A few days ago Facebook offered for my consideration and possible reposting a picture from a couple of years ago. What I’m pretty sure the robot that picked it out was unaware of was that it was taken of a stack of copies of a book I’d written that was now being remaindered.
If you’re unaware of the term, Wikipedia explains. “Remaindered books are printed books that are no longer selling well and whose remaining unsold copies are liquidated by the publisher at greatly reduced prices.” For an author when their book has been remaindered is a sad occasion. Looking at the picture I could think how fortunate I was that someone thought my writing was worth their going to all the trouble and expense of publishing. But, then the pang that while it was not only published, but positively reviewed, it didn’t sell all that well. And, now, there it was in a stack being sold off at a pretty steep discount.
Bitter sweet. The taste of life lived lucky. I thought what the heck! And I approved it being added to my current Facebook page. This generated some comments from various friends, real and of the Facebook variety, for whom apparently we’re too sensitive to use the more appropriate “acquaintance” as a descriptor. One among these whom I’ve decided should be more in the former than later category, offered a little piece by Clive James, essayist, memoirist, translator, and poet.
Several days later I find I continue to think of it.
The perfect curse on an author…
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,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book —
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.
Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler’s War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyart with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee’s Promenades and Pierrots–
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
“My boobs will give everyone hours of fun”.
Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error–
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.
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