The same thing was truly… was actually the case as well with respect to working conditions: nobody had even thought that I might need an office!  I think the notion was that I would work in Harmondsworth, but I quickly dispelled any of that notion because the editorial process was not in Harmondsworth and given my own background, which was largely editorial, I would certainly look toward the editorial side of publishing as that area that I would most want to involve myself in towards turning Penguin's fortunes around, [as] I was expected to do.

So, the editorial part of Penguin was actually in Victoria.  Rather ridiculous offices, organised vertically rather than horizontally, which [isn't] the way people would organise things today for relative easy access of people to each other and departments to each other.  Instead, people ran up and down stairs.  I was told this was rather typical of British publishing, and it was - an older form of British publishing.  Publishing today, and in the years since then, did devolve into a more or less horizontal scheme.  But at that time, many publishing companies were in houses that had never been built, or buildings that had never been built, for offices.  And I think somebody or other must have thought it was literary which, of course, was some sort of nonsense because anything that is literary is in the books, not in the architecture of the offices.