Sixpence

few.

You could have invested some sixpences.

Sixpences, yeah.

Sixpence in old money is two and a half pence in new money.

Is that right? If you're looking at sterling.

So people have tried to publish trash before.

The thing that was fantastic about Penguin is that Alan Lane saw no reason not to bring out a really good novel at Sixpence.

So in the very first run of Penguins, he included Hemingway's Farewell to Arms.

Afterwards, if you saw somebody reading a penguin, you couldn't draw any kind of conclusions about what sort of person they were.

Yes, it's not been easy, I've got to say.

We've done this, I have done issues of Brian May Sixpences, but these people have mainly gone out of business

who

did it for me.

So we've had a bit of a struggle.

And in fact, I think we're going to be late with the Sixpences, so...

I think you're the first person to know, but what we're going to do, I think, is put regular sixpences in for the beginning and then give everybody a little coupon to say, you know, when we get the proper Brian May sixpence, you will have one.

Because I didn't realise they still minted sixpences.

Possibly we were getting 6D for forced on the spud, right? Yes.

Sixpence for...

Sixpence, something like that.

Something like that.

And we want to say a shilling, let's say.

So as time went on, the doctor got more and more animals, and the people who came to see him got less and less, till at last he had no one left except the cat's meat man, who didn't mind any kind of animals.

But the cat's meat man wasn't very rich, and he only got sick once a year, at Christmastime, when he used to give the doctor sixpence for a bottle of medicine.

Sixpence a year wasn't enough to live on, even in those days long ago, and if the doctor hadn't had some money saved up in his money box, no one knows what would have happened.

And he kept on getting still more pets, and of course it cost a lot to feed them, and the money he had saved up grew littler and littler.

Then he sold his piano and let the mice live in a bureau drawer.