Now It Can Be Sold

History's shabby discards and their dejected heirs were cashing in on the fact and dialectic of disaster. Diaries, articles and book excerpts by Paul Reynaud, Maurice Gamelin, Benito Mussolini, Hermann Goering and Galeazzo Ciano had already appeared in hundreds of U.S. and foreign newspapers, and there were more to come.

Publishers, laying their billfolds on the altar of history, were hotly competing for every big-name rehash of yesterday's news.

Expertly appraising this booming market, France's smooth, slick ex-Premier and Finance Minister Reynaud announced that he was going to write his memoirs, refused to reveal what would be in them, put the unwritten opus up for auction.

Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express opened the bidding at -L-500, dropped out at -L-3,000; Lord Rothermere's Daily Mail, which finally got it for -L-18,000 ($72,000), sold -L-16,000 worth of reprint rights to other papers.

The Goering notebook, a series of disconnected sentences and phrases, proved a gold mine for a French intelligence officer who found it near Berchtesgaden. He first regarded it as a mere souvenir. Then it was worked into a connected narrative, and peddled to newspapers in a dozen countries.

Negotiations for other German documents were under way. In cafes and even in prison compounds, discredited diplomats, jobless generals and plain sad sacks talked copyright laws and literary prices. It was still an eighth wonder of the post V-E world that the Chicago Daily News had paid Edda Ciano $75,000 for her late husband's dreary diary.

Fleet Street laughed at the story of a BBC reporter who went to Lyons, asked France's blunt ex-Premier Edouard Herriot for a casual statement. Asked Herriot: "How much money do I get?''

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