In Vic's pocket was the most recent brochure from the Book-of-the-Month Club. He and Margo had joined several years ago, at the time they had put a down payment on a house and moved into the kind of neighborhood that set great stock by such things. Producing the brochure he spread it flat on the table, swiveling it so Jack could read it. The shoe salesman expressed no interest.

"Join a book club," Vic said. "Improve your mind."

"I read books," Jack said.

"Yeah. Those paperback books you get at Becker's Drugs." Jack said, "It's science this country needs, not novels. You know darn well that those book clubs peddle those sex novels about small towns in which sex crimes are committed, and all the dirt comes to the surface. I don't call that helping American science."

"The Book-of-the-Month Club also distributed Toynbee's _History_," Vic said. "You could stand reading that." He had got that as a dividend; although he hadn't quite finished it he recognized that it was a major literary and historical work, worth having in his library. "Anyhow," he said, "bad as some books are, they're not as bad as those teen-age sex elms, those drag-race films that James Dean and that bunch do."

His lips moving, Jack read the title of the current Book-of-the-Month selection "A historical novel," he said. "About the South. Civil War times. They always push that stuff. Don't those old ladies who belong to the club get tired of reading that over and over again?"

As yet, Vic hadn't had a chance to inspect the brochure. "I don't always get what they have," he explained. The current book was called _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. By an author he had never heard of: Harriet Beecher Stowe. The brochure praised the book as a daring exposé of the slave trade in pre-Civil War Kentucky. An honest document of the sordid, outrageous practices committed against hapless Negro girls.