Books are submitted to journals for review. Sometimes a book doesn't appear to have any relation to the journal's mandate and is set aside, eventually taken to a used bookstore with other such books for cash or trade. If neither, some bookstores will offer to take the book anyway, to donate to a thrift store. I am told by my bookseller friends that the offer is rarely declined.
Sometimes the publisher who sent out the review copy will "follow-up" with a note and a conversation is started. Sometimes this conversation will allow for a re-consideration -- that there is something in or about the book that makes it relevant to the journal it was submitted to. That's how I will end up with my glue-and-paper review copy of Marius Kociejowski's A Factotum in the Book Trade. In the meantime, allow me to share with you an anecdote from the PDF:
One day Allen Ginsberg came in, fresh from a trip to Poland, and was on the hunt for translations of Polish poetry. I pushed Zbigniew Herbert at him. I stayed quiet about Czesław Miłosz who had begun to irk me and who very soon, in one of poetry’s most cringeworthy moments, would kiss Ginsberg’s arse. My recently published collection Doctor Honoris Causa was on display. Ginsberg added it to his pile. I found myself in a moral quandary. I told him that the author of the title, although he had a Polish name might not qualify because he wrote in English. Ginsberg asked who he was and I said it was me. There followed a moment of confusion: Ginsberg removed the book from his pile and then gingerly put it back. After thinking a few seconds more, he returned it to the display.
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