The Book of My Enemy

“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?” – Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice

Nicola Sturgeon, the divisive former First Minister of Scotland, has published her memoir Frankly. Far from a triumph, it has been met with scathing reviews from critics who see her legacy as one of incompetence, corruption, and betrayal. J.K. Rowling’s is classic among them. In the eyes of her critics, instead of advancing Scotland’s independence, her leadership stalled it, while her policies on women’s rights are condemned as an abandonment of principle and common sense.

Here’s a tweet delighting about it’s sales and store placement:

Not only is Sturgeon’s book half price, TG Jones have it in their fiction section.

😂👍 pic.twitter.com/rBuW1GWfTz

— Agent P (@AgentP22) August 26, 2025

Cue the Schadenfreude

This delight in another’s failing brought to mind Clive James’s gloriously vindictive poem, The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered (1983). Few things capture better the mingled pettiness and delight of seeing such a literary comeuppance – a rival’s book has been dumped on the bargain table:

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 …

James rejoices in seeing his enemy’s “slim volume” stacked beside Hitler’s War Machine, The Kung-Fu Cookbook, and Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs. Yet he slyly acknowledges that his own books might one day share the same fate – not because of lack of merit, of course, but simply because of a miscalculated print run.

Remaindering and Its Reputation

“Remaindering” is the publishing industry’s term for disposing of unsold books at a deep discount. Authors dread it: the black stripe or dot across the bottom edge is the mark of failure. The word itself comes from books that have remained in the warehouse, not needed by bookshops that cannot sell them. 

Forecasting demand is a gamble. A book that sells well may be reprinted, but eventually there will be overstock. At that point, publishers must decide: send it to the pulping mills or let specialized agents buy up the surplus at a fraction of the original price. Because books are costlier than newspapers and still enjoy a certain reverence, they are often granted a second chance on the remainder table.

Remaindering has always been part of the trade, but it accelerated after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1979 Thor Power Tool decision. The ruling made it more expensive for publishers to keep unsold stock, and so the modern remainder business boomed.

Treasure Hunts in the Bargain Bin

For readers, remainder shops and bins can be treasure troves. I used to haunt one on Charing Cross Road where the shelves were packed with exactly the sort of titles James skewers: gaudy war histories, lurid books on weaponry, and ghostwritten celebrity memoirs. But there – amid the tottering piles were the hidden gems! Obscure, unpopular, and remaindered, but affordable and delightful. 

New York’s Strand, too, has its famous remainder and discount carts. It was there that I repeatedly picked up T. Coraghessan Boyle’s Water Music. I finally bought it, read it, and loved it. It  led me to buy every one of his novels for the next decade. So not all remainder stories end in humiliation; sometimes they are the beginning of a relationship with a discovered author or publisher. 

Literary Schadenfreude

Still, for most authors, remaindering apparently feels like a personal failure. For publishers, it’s simply commerce. James’s poem catches that tension exactly: the public downfall of a rival mingled with the uneasy awareness that one’s own books might be next.

This is the essence of Schadenfreude — the guilty pleasure of watching someone else stumble. and it can be a mixed emotion.  As Orwell noted, the English are distinctive for celebrating disasters rather than victories. (The Charge of the Light Brigade, the “Dunkirk spirit” etc. )

But we all know the feeling. That colleague who sailed past us for a promotion only to be quietly demoted later after royally screwing up. The smug preacher who declares that floods are God’s punishment for sin, only to flee his own flooded house in a canoe.

US Pastor Tony Perkins provided a classic in this genre. Even the BBC couldn’t resist posting  shots of his sodden home next to his solemn pronouncements.

Moralists hate Schadenfreude. Schopenhauer called it “an infallible sign of a thoroughly bad heart.” Nietzsche, more forgiving, described it as “the revenge of the impotent.” But human reality prevails. My wonderful aunt Olive – who had endured a lifetime of probable humiliations working in service to a spoiled theatrical family –  put it best: “I try very hard to be good, but I don’t always succeed.” 

And perhaps that’s the point. Schadenfreude is not dignified or gracious. It is petty, mean-spirited, and uncharitable. But it is human. It bonds us, it levels the mighty, and it offers the delicious reminder that no amount of hype can keep a bad book (or an over produced good book) off the bargain table. How wonderful (or lucky, or undeserved privilege) to have had a book at all!

So, as Clive James advised:

Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad. 

Here’s the whole poem:

‘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 seemingly 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 scrapyard 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.

Clive James

Here’s the alternative:

The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.
Hamlet (3.2)

Featured image: detail from: Still Life – French Novels and Rose by Vincent van Gogh c.1888