A Writer’s Revenge

The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered

One of my books got “remaindered,” so I got to buy hundreds of copies very cheap. (Remaindering means that this book or edition has gone out of print, but the publisher still has an inventory and sells the copies at a steep discount to distributors or the authors.) Of course, this means that the book is no longer for sale in bookstores or promoted by the publisher, but that’s the norm these days. Once I got past the regret, I decided this was a good thing as I could buy up 100 copies and sell or give them away (except the boxes are taking up room in my garage).  But it reminded me of this poem by Clive James that is just so full of  pleasurable schadenfreude:

‘The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered’

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse.

The rest of it is here:  https://web.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/bookofmyenemy.html

Believe me, it gets even more bitterly triumphant as he runs through ever more metaphors for the disgrace and humiliation of remaindering.