Eugene “Gene” Howard ran the stockroom of the Southern Michigan University bookstore–itself a branch of Beale & Bonn’s Booksellers LLC GmbH–as a second career. His first, as assistant manager for shipping and receiving at the K-Mart in town, had been a casualty of the subprime mortgage crisis, as had been his own subprime mortgage and his 401k. Gene had been left with basically the clothes on his back, the contents of his home in a series of storage lockers, and a mountain of foreclosure debt.

Retirement wasn’t gonna happen. Ever. So Gene took advantage of the fact that he was in relatively good health with logistics experience to get a job that had basic health care, his wife did the same, and they were both crossing their fingers to run out the clock without a catastrophe. Their daughter, Marley, was already in college working on accumulating her own pile of debt, so that left the B&B stockroom and the fact that Gene could work weekends for time and a half.

He didn’t resent it–far from it, in fact. Moving would have been even more ruinously expensive, and B&B had saved his finances after a humbling six months working openings at McDonald’s and closings at Walmart. Still, the drudgery of the work took its toll on him. Gene had relished the unpredictability of freight shipments at K-Mart, the thousand tiny crises that made each day different from the last. B&B was, by contrast, entirely to predictable. The freight arrived every day, like clockwork, and was all the same size. There were no surprises, and in the rare event that he met a customer, there was little he could do for them.

So Gene took his pleasure where he could get it, and that was in remainders.

B&B remaindered both textbooks and its trade books, usually when new editions came out. Gene’s job was to strip the books by tearing their covers off and then discarding the text block. His predecessor had set the “stripped” books out in the break room for people to take home, but Gene believed in the letter of the law, and those books went in the dumpster. Sure, some people whined about it–Gene’s part-time assistant, for one, was always on about saving the books. Gene responded that he was welcome to pick them out of the dumpster.

But the sordid fact of the matter was that Gene enjoyed the act of stripping and throwing the books away. The crack of spines, the snap of bindings, the way the books arced through the air when he hucked them at the dumpster which lay just off the loading dock…that was where Gene found a not insubstantial part of his joy. Who cared about what was in the books? Not like they were limited editions. No, they found their ultimate and only purposes as dissections, as missiles, as one of the only things that brightened Gene’s ditchwater-dull days.

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