Hidden clues to failure

One of my favorite book sellers is a mostly-remainder place called Daedalus Books. They have a web presence, of course, but I also get print catalogs, and I always enjoy going through them, looking for books that cater to my strange set of interests but not to a large enough audience that they were a success in the market. (Kind of the at-home version of going to the old Afterwords store, RIP).

Anyway, not to make this too long and drawn out, it's always amusing to speculate on the reasons why a book that was published at, say, $39.95, is available from Daedalus for $3.98. Some, however, don't require speculation. Consider the following, quoted from the most recent catalog:

• Are men necessary? By Maureen Dowd.
  
• Glass: A Portrait, by Robert Maycock. "Philip Glass occupies a unique place in modern classical composition." Yes, yes he does. Quite Unique.
  
• Horse Housekeeping: Everything you need to know to keep a horse at home, by Margaret and Michael Korda.
  
• Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth Century Opera, by Mary Ann Smart. "Mimomania is a thoughtful meditation on the persistence and transformation of the musical mimicry of bodily gesture ..." I got your bodily gesture right here!
  
• The Quotable Farm Animal, Ed. by Amy Glaser
  
• The Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs, by Lyall Watson
  
• The Bastard Boy, by James Wilson. "Who is the Bastard Boy, and why are so many people intent on keeping Ned from finding him?"
  
• Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter, by Blaize Clement. "Checking in on her favorite gray Abyssinian cat, Ghost, she's found a man drowned in the cat's water bowl."
  
• Gascoyne, by Stanley Crawford. "... hunting down the killer -- last seen slithering away from the crime scene in a tree sloth costume ..."
  
• Hanna's Daughters, by Marianne Fredricksson. "This sweeping story traces 100 years of Scandinavian history ..."
  
• (And my favorite this month) The Last Templar, by Raymond Khoury. "... the book leaps (from the 13th century) to post- 9/11 Manhattan, when four horsemen in Templar garb burst into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and make off with ..."
  

This sort of thing helps explain why modern yoof don't read much, anymore.