Remainder mark

How to read it

Remaindering is what a publisher does when a book has virtually stopped selling: Carter and Barker’s ABC for Book Collectors describes it as selling off the remaining stock at a heavily reduced price, to the trade, a wholesaler or a bookseller. The Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA) defines the remainder mark as a rubber stamp, a felt marker stroke or a spray, often on the bottom edge, showing that the book went back to the publisher unsold and was offered again later at a much lower price. The mark is there because of returns. Bookshops could send unsold copies back to the publisher for credit, and IOBA explains the remainder mark as the way of making sure a cheap copy couldn’t be returned for full credit. Collectors count the mark as a defect, IOBA says, and a seller describing a copy notes it, with its place if it isn’t on the bottom edge.

Also searched as: black mark on bottom of book, remainder dot, remaindered book, remainder mark.

Kinds of remainder mark

IOBA’s account of the marks: in the 1950s and 1960s the commonest were on the front free endpaper, among them an H for Random House, a P and a star in a circle. As remainders grew in number from the late 1970s, slashes and dots on the bottom or top edge of the pages, much quicker to apply, took over. Some publishers used their own devices: Ace Fantasy a capital B on one edge, Simon & Schuster its sower logo, Random House a little house. From the 1960s to the late 1980s Doubleday, and to a lesser extent Delacorte, sprayed a purple or multicoloured dye over the whole top or bottom edge, leaving a speckled finish. Remaindered pocket paperbacks were usually marked by a hole punched through the front cover, usually in the upper corner.

Bookshop marks that look the same

A mark on the edge may be a bookshop’s rather than the publisher’s. IOBA notes that bookshops, new and used, mark their own bargain books in much the same way, so that sold copies aren’t bought back or credited in full, which is why a review copy can turn up with what looks like a remainder mark. IOBA also says publishers are giving up marking remainders, and that a blank sticker over the barcode, or a black line through it, is now common in their place, though many shops put inventory stickers over barcodes too.

Hurt books

Books returned to the publisher that won’t go back into regular stock are sold off as well, as “hurts”. Publishers Weekly, describing the bargain book trade in 2008, wrote that buyers expect hurts to look like new books apart from whatever mark or stamp identifies them as non-returnable. Hurts tend to be newer titles than remainders.

Remainder bindings

Older remainders could be sheets rather than books. ABC for Book Collectors records that in the 19th century a remainder often consisted of unbound or even unfolded sheets, which the buyer had bound as cheaply as possible; the result, a remainder binding, may differ considerably from the original binding.

Why remainders grew after 1979

IOBA traces the growth of remaindering in the US to the Supreme Court’s decision in Thor Power Tool Co. v. Commissioner, decided on 16 January 1979. The case was about a tool maker, not books: the Court upheld the tax authorities in refusing Thor’s write-down of “excess” stock it was still offering at its original prices. IOBA says the decision cut publishers’ ability to write off unsold books they kept in stock, so more were pulped or remaindered.

A first printing with a remainder mark

A remainder mark doesn’t mean a copy is a later printing. IOBA gives the example of Robert Olen Butler’s stories A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, remaindered as a first printing before it won the Pulitzer Prize and went back into print.