In the year 1891, I made the acquaintance of my current publisher F.E. Fehsenfeld from Freiburg, Breisgau. I left it up to him to publish in the form of books those works which had previously been published by Pustet in Regensburg and made an agreement with him that he would thereafter also publish those written for Münchmeyer. He instantly tackled those first ones, and they sold excellently. We were both convinced that we would not be less successful with the Münchmeyer novels, but postponed the latter, until the Pustet series would be complete. Each of the two series was supposed to consist of thirty volumes. Wherever my past work fell short of filling these volumes, I had to write more. For the Pustet series, this turned out to be about ten volumes, which I still had to deliver. This work left me no time to worry about my Münchmeyer stuff right now. It was also because of this that the unexpected news that Münchmeyer had suddenly died had to be, as far as the business was concerned, entirely indifferent to me. I only inquired who his legal successor was, and when I heard that his widow continued the business with authorisation of the other heirs, I for my part saw no reason to worry. Then, something surprising happened. Mrs. Pauline Münchmeyer sent me a messenger, who had been instructed to draw out of me, whether I might be inclined to write a new novel for her. This messenger was also an "ex-convict". I sent him away, without allowing him to successfully complete his task, not giving any special though to the reason for his errant. At this time, I did not know what I found out only much later, which was that Münchmeyers were not as splendidly to do as I thought. A family meeting had been held, and the decision had been reached that the situation should be improved by a new novel by Karl May. I had neither the time nor the inclination to write it, but decided, in case the attempt would be repeated, to enter into negotiations regardless, to find out something definite about the success of my previous novels. And the repetition of the attempt came. Mrs. Münchmeyer herself called on us in person. She visited us repeatedly. She made her request. She even offered to pay the royalties in advance. She also sent Walter, the factotum, and had him write letters. I informed them that I would not be able to deliver anything new, before the issue of the older novels was not full resolved. First of all, I simply had to know the current number of subscribers of my five novels; there had to be much more than twenty thousand by now. Mrs. Münchmeyer promised to inform me. She invited me and my wife for dinner at her place, in order to give me this information there. We came. She confessed that those twenty thousand had been reached, and even for all novels, not just one of them; but a precise calculation would have to be done first, and this would be so immensely difficult and time consuming in the colportage business.