Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Angus Macbeth Interview
Narrator: Angus Macbeth
Interviewers: Tetsuden Kashima (primary), Becky Fukuda (secondary)
Location: University of California, Los Angeles
Date: September 11, 1997
Densho ID: denshovh-mangus-01-0015

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TK: On Personal Justice Denied, some people have said that once it was published -- although I'm not sure what the first run was -- that there was a long period in which it was sold, but there was a goodly number that was simply disposed of by the, by the Superintendent of Public Instructions or Documents. Is this true or not?

AM: I don't think so. My impression was that it -- I can't remember honestly what the size of the run was at the printing. But my impression was that it sold out pretty quickly.

TK: Why didn't they republish it then? Or bring it back out, or do they not do that?

AM: They didn't work like normal publishers. You know, "It's a report to Congress, we printed it, we gave it to the public," you know, "That was last year, we've got some other report to Congress this year." They just never acted like a commercial printing company. We actually took over some of the printing (work), because if you just sent it over to the GPO, which we could have done, they'd print it, but you know, they'd just print it like a government report. And so we decided it was worth it from the Commission's point of view to find a printer ourselves, and a font and a paper weight and everything else, to make this look like something you'd want to pick up and read. And we did it that way. I forget just exactly the terms of the arrangement with the Government Printing Office, but then they got the final product and the commission itself... we had copies to distribute to all of Congress, obviously, and a number of places in the Executive Branch and a number for people who had testified and so on. And then we sent copies to all the depository libraries in the country. And that eats up a good number of copies in the end, just doing those things. Because there are 535 members of Congress before you start and a number of them naturally called and wanted another copy and you can't be in a position of not having any. So I think just for immediate distribution, apart from the libraries, the commission probably had 1,500 or 2,000 of them and then there are the libraries and then the rest went out to the government bookstores. But my impression always was that they sold them out pretty quickly. There was a good deal of demand in the Japanese American community alone. And I think a reasonable amount other places, too.

TK: I kept using them in my class until they ran out.

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