Roy Jensen is a fantastic remainder company- they consistently stock the best art, photography and architecture remainders, elite titles you won't find slumming at the sale racks at Borders or Barnes & Noble with all the crummy 'made remainders' and genre fiction overruns.
but they do two things that drive me crazy.
They don't mark the box with the invoice.
Extremely annoying when you're receiving a big order.
They don't alphabetize the invoice.
Which makes checking in the books a big pain in the ass.
Are they still using a Univac at Roy Jensen HQ?
Bonus Book Trivia Footnote
In the book business a remainder is an unsold copy of a commercial title that has been sold off by the publisher at a steep discount. In short, a 'real' book that failed in the marketplace and has been given up on by the publisher.
In the used book business there is no stigma attached to a remaindered title- some of them sell fantastically well. We bought several cases of this title as a remainder with a suggested retail of $14.95, sold enough of them in-store at $19.95 to cover the cost and sat on the rest for a while. When the book ended up being as good as we thought it was, we sold the rest on the net for $30.00.
a 'made remainder' is a book published specifically for the 'sale table' market. There was never an original edition, the book was just put together & printed cheaply so it can make the publisher a good profit selling at $4.98 or $7.98 or whatever. I don't buy them over the counter and we don't buy them from remainder companies. Our house term for most of them is "a non-book book", meaning it looks like a book if you flip through it and give it a cursory inspection, but there's not really anything holding it together. There's no meat on its bones....of course, because in book publishing as in cooking meat is expensive.
Made remainders are fluff tarted up to resemble something better, which is why we steer clear of them.
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