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I took the Ms. up to the only publisher I knew: a fellow named Richard Simon, who was a friend of my Amherst classmate, Arthur Beckhard. Dick was just starting in the publishing business—a turn of events which both Beckhard and I considered unfortunate; for this tall, handsome, and extremely intelligent young man was one of the finest amateur pianists we had ever heard. Not only was he gifted musically, Nature had endowed him with hands that could spread easily to a third above an octave, giving him an extraordinary grasp of the keyboard, and enabling him to perform extremely difficult passages without effort. Beckhard and I had urged him to become a concert pianist, but after considerable thought he had decided against it. "There's no point in being a concert pianist unless you're one of the best," he had said, and he didn't think he would ever be that good."

So now here he was, in a small suite of offices just west of Fifth Avenue on Fifty-Seventh Street, busily unpacking and stacking volumes of a book which had just come back from the printer. He picked up a copy and showed it to me: it was a book of crossword puzzles. I leafed through it, thinking "What a shame he's wasting his talent on things like this." At which point a stocky, determined-looking man in shirt sleeves came in with another armful of copies, and was introduced as his partner, Max Schuster.

- Joseph Moncure March

(Two pages later, March begins working for "a Concert Bureau" and becomes "thorougly disillusioned" at its commercial aspects, noting "I had not worked there long before I began to feel that Dick Simon had been right not to become a concert pianist.")