LORD CAMROSE LEFT for New York on the Queen Elizabeth in the middle of October 1946. He took with him a copy of the cabinet office’s approval, some samples of Churchill’s war minutes and a two-page synopsis of the memoirs which Churchill expected to take up five volumes.
Churchill balanced Lord Camrose’s patrician diffidence with the silky sales skills of Emery Reves, who Churchill asked at the last minute to join Lord Camrose on the Queen Elizabeth. When Reves objected that the ship would be fully booked by now, Churchill telephoned Cunard’s chairman and within twenty minutes Reves had ‘a stateroom with a bath’.
Once on board, Reves found that Lord Camrose had no idea who he was or why he was there. They came to an agreement: Lord Camrose would deal with the newspapers, while Reves would concentrate on magazine and book publishers. Nevertheless, a cautious Lord Camrose insisted upon a formal exchange of letters. ‘I think it desirable that it should be on record that 1. You are making this trip on your own account entirely; 2. Any conversation we may have does not commit either of us in any way whatsoever,’1 he wrote to his new companion. Reves was happy to sign, confident that they could reach a figure of four or five million dollars if allowed a free hand. ‘If you put such figures into the old man’s head, it will be impossible to make any deal,’ Lord Camrose warned him. Reves concluded that Lord Camrose, as the owner of The Daily Telegraph, was ‘more experienced in buying copyright than selling it’.2
They arrived in New York on 21 October 1946 and stayed in different hotels on opposite sides of Madison Square, meeting each evening to compare notes. There was a natural tension between them – Camrose was already guaranteed a slice of the spoils, Reves none. The Daily Telegraph’s New York office warned of Reves’s ‘rather slippery’ reputation, although it acknowledged that he was ‘a very enterprising person’ who knew the South American market well.3
Reves’s first visit to Collier’s Weekly did not go well. The magazine’s editor, still William Chenery, questioned Reves’s credentials to represent Churchill, with whom Chenery claimed to have just negotiated directly a $25,000 fee for an article based on a recent speech in Zürich. ‘Please cable whether this is correct,’ Reves asked Churchill that evening. ‘Sincerely believe would be mistake offering jus primae noctis [right of the first night] before marriage for any price.’4 Lord Camrose cabled Churchill to reassure him that he was in command: ‘Reves acting under close control from me but have not allowed him to mention my name for reasons of security and strategy.’5
A visit to Daniel Longwell, LIFE’s managing editor, did not go well either. Reves never mentioned it to Churchill’s biographer, his son Randolph, but Longwell recorded it in a taped interview for Time Inc.’s corporate history: ‘A little fellow by the name of Reavis [sic], I think, who had been an agent of Churchill’s, appeared and said he was representing Churchill on these memoirs,’ he recalled, ‘and that sort of threw me for a loop because I knew that he had said Camrose would be in charge. What Reves didn’t tell me was that Camrose was in town.’6
Soon afterwards, Reves warned Churchill that Lord Camrose’s style was ill-suited to the American market, which preferred raw competition to secrecy. What was needed, he claimed, was a single organization ready to shoulder all the risks of buying the entire rights package, but he claimed that Lord Camrose lacked the necessary appetite. Cooperation Publishing, on the other hand, was ready to act, funded by a wealthy Churchill admirer.
Camrose had told Reves to drop the scheme, but Reves wanted him overruled, while insisting that their relationship remained ‘extremely cordial and satisfactory’: ‘I do hope you will understand my motive for going over the head of the Field Commander to the Commander-in-Chief,’ he told Churchill. ‘It is up to you to court martial or decorate me.’7 Churchill’s reply was terse: ‘Pray be guided by C[amrose] in everything.’8
Despite their different styles, Camrose was glad to have Reves with him. ‘He is a clever salesman with an abundance of ideas and many contacts,’ he told Churchill. ‘Where he is to figure in the ultimate picture I do not, at the moment, know but we can discuss this on my return.’ Camrose’s own approach had been characteristically British: ‘It has been my policy to be careful not to show any eagerness and, above all, to avoid any action which might result in publicity,’ he explained. ‘Up to the moment, in this direction, I have been entirely successful and not a word of my doings has appeared in the papers.’9
During the pair’s first three weeks in New York, many of their prime targets proved ill or absent – The New York Times’s Arthur Sulzberger in St Louis for a hand operation, the Chicago Sun’s Marshall Field III detained in his home city, TIME-LIFE’s Henry Luce travelling in China – but Camrose nevertheless asked for final bids on Churchill’s memoirs by Friday 22 November.
According to Reves’s account (widely accepted ever since),10 LIFE failed to bid at all that day; The New York Times offered $750,000 on its own and the Chicago Sun syndicate (including the New York Herald Tribune) bid $1,100,000 for worldwide rights, bar those already reserved for The Daily Telegraph and Cassell. According to Reves, Lord Camrose favoured the Chicago Sun bid, but Reves suggested they try one more time to get a rival offer from LIFE; he claims to have persuaded Mrs Luce to rouse her husband from a jet-lagged sleep after returning from China and convinced him to meet them on the Monday.
In fact, LIFE did bid in the first round, The New York Times did not offer $750,000 and Henry Luce had returned from China two weeks earlier, on 8 November.11 General Julius Adler, The New York Times’s general manager, had suggested to Luce that LIFE and The New York Times should work together. Luce and Longwell, LIFE’s managing editor, decided that the deal made sense: The Times’s footprint hardly ran ‘further than Trenton [New Jersey] and probably New Haven [Connecticut], and a few copies to Washington’, whereas LIFE sold five million copies nationwide.12
So Longwell did a deal with Adler: LIFE would run weekly excerpts of Churchill’s memoirs, The New York Times would run daily excerpts, except at weekends. With a week to go before Camrose’s deadline, Longwell asked his colleague Walter Graebner in London to find out what he could. Graebner met Churchill at Chartwell and reported back to Longwell:
Camrose is reporting lengthily by mail to London. In latest letter he says he has appointment with Luce November 22 at which time apparently he intends to discuss proposition. He would welcome an offer from LIFE which I am convinced he prefers to all other publications, but he explained that he could neither feel committed to LIFE nor accept lower offers from us than he got elsewhere. Our friend [Churchill] asked that entire conversation be kept in strictest confidence so please give no indication whatever to Camrose that you possess foregoing information.13
Lord Camrose arranged to meet LIFE last on the day before the 22 November deadline. The magazine’s offer of $1,250,000 included an allowance for book rights, said to be $200,000, but no named publisher. Camrose did not take Reves to the meeting and did not consult him before cabling the auction results to Churchill.
[Henry Luce] is working in conjunction with Adolph [sic].*1 Adolph has made an independent offer of 300 [$300,000] for serialization in his paper in event of Henry’s combined offer not being acceptable. Helen [Rogers Reid of the New York Herald Tribune] offer 1100 not yet definitely confirmed... Offers for American book rights from three firms all in neighbourhood of 200 but possibly final bid could be increased to 225. Possibly Henry and Helen offers might be improved in final show-down but not materially.
Camrose advised a quick closure, but spelled out his fellow-negotiator’s contrary view: ‘Reves believes that with basis of 300 from Adolph and individual nation-wide canvassing by him of all newspapers outside New York he could bring total from serial to much larger figure. This would require two to three months’ time and substantial commission. Would also necessitate considerable advance publicity.’14
Lord Camrose asked for guidance, but Churchill reminded him that only the trust could decide, before conveying that he was ‘personally agreeably impressed’ at the result; he added that ‘there seemed to be advantages in the Luce offer on account of its simplicity’, and that he had spoken to two trustees, ‘C[lementine] and BB [Brendan Bracken] who are favourable’, and was sure the third ‘CL [Professor Lindemann] would agree’.15
Reves complained to Churchill that he had not been consulted. He tried again to carve out a role for Cooperation Publishing: ‘If situation can be created giving me authority to dictate prices, I am convinced result can be greatly improved. Perhaps purchase contract with trust can be signed leaving final figure open for a few months. I realize this requires great confidence. Please do not mention C[amrose] this cable and do not reveal its content.’16 Churchill ignored him. However, Lord Camrose conceded that they could improve on the book bids. Before travelling to Montreal to sell the Canadian newspaper rights, he told LIFE to re-bid without the book rights and gave Reves the chance to put together a firm bid for them, so long as he beat the indicated price of $200,000.
Reves rushed down to Boston, where he lunched with Henry Laughlin and Paul Brooks, president and editor-in-chief of Houghton Mifflin. Reves had introduced a book*2 to the firm two years earlier in return for a share of the revenues and he wanted the same arrangement for bringing Churchill’s memoirs. By the time lunch was over, Laughlin and Brooks had agreed to fund a bid of $250,000, paying Reves 15 per cent retail royalties once their outlay was recouped, plus an immediate 25 per cent, rising to 50 per cent, on sales to book clubs.
Back in New York Camrose arranged a second meeting with LIFE on the afternoon of Wednesday 27 November. He warned them in advance that they would have to raise their price, which worked out at $1,050,000 once the book rights were stripped out. Roy Larsen, the company’s president, was ready to throw in an extra $100,000, but Longwell suggested asking The New York Times for more money too, so that they could together reach $1,250,000. Longwell later recalled:
I called Adler at his home that night and said that if he really wanted this with us, he would have to pick up $400,000. He agreed. Next afternoon Camrose was to see us at 5 o’clock, and the Herald Tribune called me to have a final talk. I suddenly realized that the other syndicates were being sort of hard pressed to get up to the amount LIFE and The Times were bidding, so I got back here about twenty minutes before we met with Camrose and told Larsen that we should be all right if we lowered our bid to $1,150,000, of which I expected The Times to pay $400,000.17
At the start of the meeting, Larsen spelled out the new price: ‘Lord Camrose nodded a couple of times and – none of us understood what the nod meant, and we were very excited when he said, “That’s fine,” and we got it.’18 Camrose’s cable to England that evening was short and to the point: ‘Please inform trust have closed with Henry for 1150. Book goes to Houghton Mifflin for 250. Total 1400.’19
He left New York the next evening, Thanksgiving Day, having raised an additional $110,000 from the Montreal Standard for the Canadian serial rights. ‘Going on board tonight and delighted at prospect,’ he told Churchill.20
The first press leak emerged within a fortnight. The North American Newspaper Alliance ran a story claiming that a $700,000 bid (its own) had failed. It predicted that Churchill would earn ‘more than $1 million and probably about $1.25 million’ from America alone, with more to come from the rest of the world.21
It took the American consortium a long time to find out what The Daily Telegraph and Cassell had paid for their rights: £75,000 and £40,000 respectively. On his return to Britain, Lord Camrose raised almost another £60,000 from Australia, South Africa and Ireland. After Reves had explained to him the complexities of selling to the less-familiar markets of continental Europe, Asia and South America, Lord Camrose asked him to name a price for purchasing the foreign language rights as a single package. Reves quoted £25,000 before testing the markets, but then returned with a price of £45,000, which Camrose pushed up to £47,500.22 It was still to prove a bargain.
By the time the trustees had ratified the package in January 1947, the worldwide sale of rights for Churchill’s memoirs had reached £550,000; it ended up at £600,000 or $2 ½ million. It was the world’s largest-ever non-fiction publishing deal.23 Just over half the money had come from America, but TIME-LIFE was content. Each volume of the memoirs would fill nearly ninety of LIFE’s editorial pages, Longwell calculated, equivalent to two whole issues, which would bring in $4 million of advertising revenue. Seen in that context, the magazine’s fee to Churchill of $150,000 for each volume seemed modest. ‘We always got credit for paying more than we really did,’ he told his successor.24
Churchill was happy, too. His trust would clear at least £375,000 over the five volumes, while he earned £175,000 as the author – and The Daily Telegraph was to lend him an extra £15,000 on signature without charging interest.25 Nevertheless, Reves told Houghton Mifflin in confidence that they had picked up the American book ‘under most favourable conditions’, judging from the prices the Europeans were bidding. Between them, Reves reported, French and Dutch publishers had paid him comfortably more than Houghton Mifflin had paid for the US rights, although the two European countries’ combined market was one-tenth of America’s size.26
While his memoirs were being sold, Churchill returned his attention to the world’s stock markets. An economic recovery that had followed the war was making these more rewarding for investors than they had been during the Depression. On his own initiative, Churchill had sold all his bond holdings at a profit in April 1946 and asked his manager at Lloyds Bank to suggest shares to take their place. Without any advice on individual companies and their shares available inside the bank, Harris consulted a personal friend who made two suggestions: the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and Imperial Continental Gas. By the time Churchill asked him for more information, Harris’s friend had disappeared to a remote part of Yorkshire and could not be contacted. Lloyds Bank’s role as a stock market adviser to Churchill came to an end.
Churchill turned instead to his brother. Although Jack had retired from Vickers da Costa at the start of the war, he nevertheless helped Churchill to spend £65,000 on buying eighteen new shareholdings through Vickers before the end of May.27 There were faint echoes of the 1930s as contract notes from Vickers kept arriving in the post and the staff at Chartwell were once again tracking daily share prices; the big difference was that Churchill finished 1946 with modest profits of £1,350.28
By then, Lord Camrose’s second syndicate of bankers and business friends had paid Churchill the agreed price of £50,000 to buy Chartwell on behalf of the National Trust. Churchill used the extra money to revive his farming ambitions, although Clementine was against the idea. ‘He wants to have land girls and chickens & cows here,’29 she had complained to their daughter Mary after the war, when to her relief Kent’s chief agricultural officer Percy Cox had not been able to find any suitable land or cattle near Chartwell. Now, however, their neighbour offered first refusal on the 157 acres of Chartwell Farm. With the Camrose syndicate’s money to hand, Churchill decided not to miss out. Knight Frank & Rutley helped Cox negotiate a price of £25,000 for the farmhouse and cottages, plus a year’s use of the departing Major Marnham’s dairy herd.30 Two months later, Churchill spent £10,250 adding another 116 acres, ‘practically adjoining Chartwell’, at Parkside Farm, including heated greenhouses and a cold fruit store.31 A proud Churchill instructed his bank, which had lent him £21,500 towards the purchases, to open a new Chartwell Farm account, through which he would channel ‘the whole farming capacity of the 340 acre Chartwell estate’.32
Clementine’s main concern was that there was nobody to run the farms. This problem was solved, however, when Mary’s new husband Christopher Soames had a duodenal ulcer burst during their honeymoon. He had to leave the army and was engaged to look after the farms on a salary of £400 a year, living free in the farmhouse. ‘My knowledge of farming is, to say the least, negligible,’ Soames warned.33 Two months later Churchill snapped up 94 more acres at Bardogs Farm for £8,700.34 The estate had now grown to 450 acres, although it was to prove still too small for the wide range of arable, dairy, pigs, poultry and market gardening undertaken by Chartwell Farms.
Jack died from a heart attack in April 1947, as negotiation surrounding the contracts for Churchill’s memoirs dragged on throughout the spring. The interests of book publishers and newspaper editors often clashed and, as extra jurisdictions entered the frame, copyright complications multiplied. Daniel Longwell at LIFE was keen to protect his company against the risk of Churchill producing extra volumes. ‘I insisted on a clause in there that no matter what the length of the book was – five volumes or six – we paid one single price,’ he recorded.35
His chairman Henry Luce was more worried that politics or ill health would dog their seventy-two-year-old author or that he might write for rival publications. Many at LIFE wanted Churchill bound by contract not to write elsewhere, but Walter Graebner argued that they should treat Churchill as a man of Edwardian manners. Now a regular at Chartwell, Graebner showed his host a copy of the cable that he planned to send to New York. It read: ‘“Gentlemen’s agreement, yes” [Churchill] said, “But binding contract no.”’ Churchill amended it to read: ‘Moneywise, there would be no point in writing articles because all the proceeds would disappear in taxes.’36
This ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ was put to the test at the end of March when Churchill proposed to write an article on President Truman’s ‘momentous’ speech setting out a new foreign policy to contain expansion of the Soviet Union. The consortium agreed to treat the article as a ‘dry run’ and shared the cost, The New York Times picking up 34.78 per cent of Churchill’s $25,000 fee, the same proportion of the American payments that it would shoulder for the memoirs.37
By April Lord Camrose called all the parties to London to settle a few outstanding points. LIFE was always to publish first, the newspapers to serialize up to 40 per cent of each volume, and the books to appear a week after the newspaper extracts had ended.38 ‘99 per cent set’, Graebner cabled to New York at the end of the second day’s talks.39 All agreed that the deal should be announced on 15 May, the day after Lord Camrose signed the Houghton Mifflin contract.
‘CHURCHILL MEMOIRS BRING A DOLLAR A WORD’ ran The New York Times’s front-page headline, over a picture showing the author at work in his study.40 Not shown was the supporting ‘syndicate’ that Churchill had already assembled: Bill Deakin, his pre-war literary assistant; General ‘Pug’ Ismay, his former chief of staff; General Sir Henry Pownall, who had experience of pre-war rearmament, the fall of France, Singapore’s surrender and the secret ‘Ultra’ material which Britain had obtained by breaking German military codes (although this could not be mentioned in the memoirs); and Commodore Gordon Allen, a former naval officer, who had worked at Combined Operations HQ. The four were later joined by Denis Kelly, an Oxford history graduate and under-employed barrister.
By July 1947 the first volume of Churchill’s memoirs was sufficiently presentable for Longwell at LIFE to spend a month in England working on the magazine’s layout and illustrations. He was given access to the family scrapbook at Chartwell, where Churchill also posed for new colour photographs. Then Longwell did what Lord Camrose warned him no one in England would dare to do: he suggested changes to the text of the memoir, many of which Churchill accepted. Longwell was at first irritated by the way Lord Camrose kept referring to him in front of Churchill as a photographer; however, fences were mended when LIFE decided to share its pictures with other consortium members. Lord Camrose began addressing his letters ‘My dear Longwell’.41
Meanwhile, Churchill was busy trying to establish some style rules with his veteran proofreader Eddie Marsh:
1. I am still balancing between ‘Goering’ and ‘Göring’ and ‘Fuehrer’ and ‘Führer’ etc. Curiously I like some some one way and some t’other. 2. On the whole I am against commas... On the other hand I am very much in favour of the semi-colon; and think that blighter should have a good run for his money in the text. 3. We are both agreed that capitals should be reduced as much as possible. Will you think out the principle of capitals and talk to me about them. For instance, must the ‘A’ in ‘Ally’ always be cap?42
Political demands on the leader of the Opposition’s time remained relatively modest while the Labour government enjoyed such a strong parliamentary majority. However, the rhythm of writing could still be disturbed by the lure of painting or the stock market. Churchill added £23,000 of government bonds to balance the shares in his portfolio in July,43 but shortly afterwards the government’s decision to restore the pound’s free convertibility into the dollar*3 led to a run on the currency, causing bond prices to fall by 2 per cent and leading shares to fall by 10 per cent within a fortnight.
Alarmed, Churchill asked the newly ennobled Lord Bracken how he could invest more safely, yet still earn his rewards in the untaxed form of capital appreciation. Bracken directed him to the shares of Argentinian railways, which were quoted in London but had fallen sharply while they awaited the Argentinian government’s nationalization terms; they were expected to rise almost 15 per cent before compensation was paid a year or two later, Bracken advised.44 Within weeks, Churchill spent £65,000 buying shares in the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway, Buenos Aires Western Railway and Central Argentine Railway.45
For its 1947 Summer Exhibition, which was open to the public, the Royal Academy of Arts had selected two paintings by Churchill (Winter Sunshine and Loup River) that he had submitted anonymously. To handle the public demand for their reproduction Churchill appointed advertising agents Walter Judd, who sent him a first cheque for £20 in September. Its arrival prompted Churchill to ask his local Inland Revenue officer, known as an inspector, for an assurance that he would not be branded as a professional artist and subjected to income tax as a result.46 The answer was not encouraging. The tax inspector not only refused to give such an assurance but threatened to reopen the file on Churchill’s past earnings from his pictures. He settled for a limited barter arrangement with the Soho Gallery: the gallery arranged a free supply of Christmas cards using images of several of Churchill’s paintings, in return for the right to reuse the images six months later on its own greetings cards.
Meanwhile the LIFE team had become concerned that Churchill’s summer distractions had slowed progress on the proofs for the first volume of his memoirs, which had only advanced from ‘Provisional Semi-final’ to ‘Provisional Final’ by the time Parliament reassembled in October.47 Walter Graebner did his best to nudge Churchill towards working on the text, supplying him with new pens and dealing with other potential distractions, such as finding a replacement for Rufus the poodle, who had been run over during the Tory Party’s annual conference.48 However, Graebner took the art of chivvying to a whole new level when he suggested to his superiors in New York that TIME-LIFE should pay for Churchill and his team to take a Christmas ‘working holiday’ in the Moroccan sunshine, well away from politics.
At the time each Briton was limited to taking £35 abroad to spend in the course of a foreign holiday, one of a series of measures introduced by Britain’s post-war government to preserve its limited reserves of sterling. The sum was too small to allow Churchill to holiday in the style to which he was accustomed, so he had not enjoyed a holiday in the sun since his visit to Italy two years earlier. Walter Graebner was therefore able to report to New York an enthusiastic reception almost as soon as he was allowed to extend the invitation. ‘Mr Churchill agrees with our suggestion that it would be in the interests of LIFE (and perhaps other members of the syndicate) to go to Marrakech this winter to work. He gladly accepts our proposal to pay his expenses and is leaving their arrangements to us,’ Graebner relayed.49 A few days later, he reported on more detailed arrangements:
He plans to fly there on December 12 with his wife, Sarah, security, Greenfields and detective and stay about a month. The best procedure would be for us to deposit funds at a bank in Marrakesh. One point remains unsettled. Does our invitation include air passage to and from Marrakesh, regardless of whether it could be paid in sterling? I would like to be able to say we will pay all.50
LIFE was about to offer to pay for the flights when British Aviation Services authorized its Silver City Airways subsidiary to transport the party in both directions free of charge. So instead LIFE deposited $5,000 in Churchill’s name, in order to pay his hotel bills, at the Banque d’État du Maroc.51
Meanwhile Longwell at LIFE tried to share the expense with his fellow American syndicate members. The New York Times agreed, but Houghton Mifflin declined, even though the first volume of Churchill’s memoirs was sure to be a financial success, having just won the Book of the Month Club’s coveted selection. The Club’s 800,000 members had to choose six books a year from a monthly list of ten, but ‘Book of the Month’ selections normally guaranteed at least 200,000 orders.52
On the eve of his departure, Churchill sent the new cabinet secretary Sir Norman Brook a copy of the ‘Provisional Final’ text of the memoirs’ first volume for his approval. Sir Norman shared his predecessor’s view that Churchill’s work was the closest Britain would come to an official war history. He read three successive proofs within a few weeks and offered the advice of an informal proofreader, becoming, in the words of David Reynolds’s masterful account of the memoirs, almost ‘an additional member of the Syndicate’.53
At the Mamounia hotel in Marrakech, Churchill, his daughter Sarah, Bill Deakin, two secretaries, a valet and detective took over seven bedrooms and bathrooms, a sitting room and studio at a fixed price of 16,150 francs (or £35 a day); this included one bottle of Moroccan wine for the secretaries, valet and detective to share at each meal.54 When the first week’s hotel bill came to £300, Churchill justified the arrangement to Clementine:
When you recollect how much it means to all these publishers to get delivery of volume I by the end of February, and that they would perhaps lose many thousands of pounds and suffer immense inconvenience if I failed them, I feel fully justified in the course I have taken, which results only from the fact of our own currency regulations which prevent me from using my own money.55
However, the first week was by some margin the least expensive of the five weeks the party eventually spent at the hotel. ‘The money here arn’t arf going,’ one of the secretaries reported home about halfway through the trip.56 The second week cost £405, the third £458, and the fourth and fifth more than £600 each. The hotel had wisely excluded the cost of the drinks on Churchill’s own table from the fixed price, so the list of extras came to 203,000 francs or £400 for the stay.57
Before Graebner joined the party, along with Lord Camrose, in mid-January, Churchill had already asked him for an extra $5,000. He greeted Graebner with a request for another $1,500.58 They were still some $2,000 short when the party came to leave.59 Deakin was not sure that the American publishers had received full value for the final bill of $13,600:60 their guest had painted more than he had worked, he thought, but at least January’s last proofs were now labelled ‘Final’ – even if Churchill spoiled the effect by adding, in his own hand, ‘Subject to Full Freedom of Proof Correction’.61
*1 Camrose appears to use the wrong name as a reference to the owner of The New York Times. Its previous owner, Adolph Ochs, had died eleven years earlier. After 1935, his son-in-law Arthur Sulzberger was the newspaper’s president and his nephew Julius Adler its general manager.
*2 Jan Karski’s Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State 1939–1944. Reves received a commission of 2½ per cent of sales revenues on the first 50,000 copies sold to the retail trade and 20 per cent of sales to book clubs.
*3 Introduced on 15 July 1947, but abandoned by the government five weeks later on 20 August.