#herbert s. schell

It was a box of returns, gentle reader, from a major distributor. Just as you might return a product that you find you can’t use, so it goes in the book business. Bookstores return slow-moving stock to the distributors who provide it, and distributors return it to the publishers. Only a tiny percentage of the books that we send out are returned, but in this case, the distributor had apparently been saving up returns for a while, and we got a box the size of a goat.