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papers, with the result that three bookstores in Mississippi closed their accounts in a rage, thereby costing us about $9 worth of business a year.
But that was to show you how naive he could be on occasion.
When he finally saw the writing on the wall...
Well, it came out that we only sold about 7,000 sets. We were stuck with all the rest of them. A lot of them came back. I tried to persuade Sam Rosenman that, let us send these books out to libraries or schools at cost and get some rich supporters of Roosevelt to supply the funds. All we wanted was our manufacturing cost back. We had already taken a terrible shellacking on the set. Rosenman wouldn't do that. He thought that we ought to give the sets away. We had lost enough money on this set already, we thought, so we remaindered them finally for about four or five dollars a set.
The President was very offended. He didn't think that we should have done this. But he had no suggestions himself. He was a rich man himself, but he took his full royalty and so did Sam Rosenman. Nobody would help us in any way. The sets were taking up a tremendous amount of space in the warehouse. We couldn't keep them there so we finally sold them all out.
Then he did another five volumes later, but MacMillan did that.
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