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Did they help you?

No, I actually studied it, from books--what's it all about, how does it work--and that's one of the reasons I got involved with and enthusiastic about Charlie Stillman, who was really the boss on production, about the need for us to -- again an experimental department in the whole printing and paper area. Because we realized that nothing new had been done in the printing area in the last--I don't know how many--decades, and that the printers as far as we could find out had no laboratories. They didn't do any research. So we ended up by creating our own research outfit, just in Connecticut, and we made some improvements on our own. But the major impact was it drove our suppliers crazy to see us doing this, and see us trying to tell them how to run their business. So they all got into the research business in due course, and we were able to fold our tent: we'd achieved our ends [laughter].

Go ahead! What else were you doing?

Having come from the editorial end, I kept working very closely with the editors, and good promotion is essentially a collaborative effort between editors and promoters. Most people won't agree to that, but that's my view of what good promotion is. The person in charge of promotion should work with the managing editor on choosing covers, on what is it you're going to feature, because that's what you're going to promote I And if there isn't