When ?The Most Beloved of All Humans? appeared, a scandal broke loose. It was said that Marin Preda received 1 million dollars. One million dollars was enough to renovate the Cozia Monastery. (A. V., 52)

Presents were made - Xerox copies or whole printed books - for instance: ?The Paltinis Diary?, Steinhardt. When my father, Radu Petrescu went to France, he made only one trip, but he shortened his stay just to buy books. He came with huge suitcases with books, out of which they confiscated Eliade and Eugen Ionescu at the customs. He honestly hoped to hide them among the Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie books. (A. V., 52)

In ?88, I stayed in the rain five hours queuing in front of a bookstore. I knew that they had a book by Liiceanu. I took 7 copies of the ?Epistolary? and I gave them to my friends. After I read the book I wrote a letter to the author. I was excited beyond control. Fortunately, I did not send it. (111)

As soon as you saw that in a shop, in a bookstore, they ?had? books? This was another caption at the time, they ?had?, they ?brought??a lot of people queued. For anything. Everything they had at the bookstore, was bought, books were very cheap. Sometimes, among them, you could find Bulgakov or that one, what was her name, Rodica Ojoc-Brasoveanu with the police captain who would come victorious out of every situation, this was different. But you had to queue for books. (S. R.-B., D. R.-B., 138)

There were no queues in front of the bookstores. The books were sold in the back. ?The Most Beloved Of All Humans?, created an extraordinary confusion, everybody thought that it was about Comrade Ceausescu,?we made a detour when we saw it on the table, until the first people had the chance to read it, and at that moment, it disappeared completely, and it became a thing of fantastic exchange value.

The books were not expensive. The shop assistants from the bookstore did not sell them with more money, although they could have. But money was not important. One could have big amount of money, but when one had the chance to buy a good book, one seemed to have been blessed by God. The shop assistants sold books in exchange for other favors. Favors in return for favors. (I.H., 54)

There were good books, very good books. I meant the publishing houses had different collections. There was: ?Adventure?, where one could read adventure books. I remember there was an ?A? on the cover. Later on, there was the collection ?Enigma?, a collection of adventure books, too. The ?Dauphin? collection was pretty much the same, as a genre. The collection for children was ?The Library for Everyone?. A book was 2 lei. 2 lei! So I bought all kinds of them for me. One could have found everything. You could buy from Creanga ??the Goat with Three Kids?- to Kafka. All the possibly imaginable range. The bookstores were loaded. This was up until 1985 or 1986. (I. H., 29)

Towards the end of the eighth decade, all the books that were published started to look worse and worse. The paper looked more and more as toilet paper, very often having different hues from pink to green, sometimes even three shades in the same volume. (160)