IT was shortly before Christmas in 1929 that I welcomed to the shop an old gentleman who was introduced to me by the Prague consul for El Salvador as His Excellency Fuentes, then accredited Minister to Berlin. He was in search of a set of crystal glasses for the palace of the president of his own country, and he wanted it complete for a hundred settings. During an entire morning I showed him what we had.

Señor Fuentes promised to return in a few days to give me his decision. After he had gone I put on my hat and went across the street to call upon Antonín Hardt at the bank. I told him what had happened, adding that I believed the Minister had been troubled in making a decision about a crystal pattern because he was also looking for china for the president’s table, and he wanted the two to match as nearly as possible. I went on to outline my plans for making a double sale.

Next morning two exceedingly stiff and correct German gentlemen arrived to call on me. They were managers of the Bohemian Ceramic Works which happened also to be the property of the Associated Bank. Hermann Gründlich was a short, stocky, middle-class German of the Third Reich who repeated everything he said twice over in long German phrases of pedantic exactness, as though he had come to give me a lecture on some branch of Wissenschaft. His companion, Adolf Fischer, was a tall, lean, uncommunicative German, also of the Reich, who was, I knew, one of the finest technicians in the ceramic industry. In spite of his equal rank in the firm, he clicked his heels and sat at attention whenever his colleague spoke to him.

They brought samples of dinner sets because they had been instructed to do so by the bank, but while they displayed the dishes they made no attempt to hide their distrust of me as an impertinent opportunist. How could I expect to sell their china when I knew nothing about it? They had also brought portfolios of figures to back each plate, as though all sales were simply a matter of paper work. After they had gone I looked over the files and realized it would take an expert to decipher them, so I put them aside and concentrated on the china itself, matching pieces with some of our crystal sets in a way that I hoped would please the Minister from El Salvador.

Two days later Señor Fuentes gave me an order for a complete glass and china installation for his president’s palace, one hundred of everything. It came to a figure that neither factory had ever seen before in a single retail business transaction. While accountants in their bookkeeping departments sharpened pencils and put away red ink for some time to come, I was consumed with excitement over the prospect of a new field of activity that was already growing rapidly in my imagination.

I cared nothing now for Edward the Seventh and Queen Alexandra. They were dead royalty. If I could make a sale of such magnitude in a small shop on Příkopy to the head of a state which I had trouble locating on a map, how much more could I sell to the heads of states all around me in Europe?