Brian Mulroney ( March 20, 1939 – February 29, 2024), R+I+P

Brian Mulroney, PC, CC, GOQ, Her late Majesty's Canadian Prime Minister from 1984 until 1993 is dead. May he rest in peace. 

When I lived in Edmonton, I worked in a used bookshop called The Book Nook. We were a 'remainder house'. Books that fail to sell in the chain bookstores like Chapters and Indigo are returned to the publishers for credit. The publishers then sell them to shops like the Book Nook, usually by weight, shipped by the pallet-full.

After Mulroney retired as PM, he wrote a book, titled Memoirs: 1939–1993. It did not sell well in the major stores. Probably thousands of copies were returned for credit. 

One pallet of remainders we bought contained around a hundred or so copies of his book. Our policy was to price the book at 50% of the publisher's price and then reduce it from there if it didn't sell. If I remember correctly, the publisher's price was CD$39.95, so we priced it at CD$19.95. 

I don't think we sold a single copy at that price. We reduced it to CD$9.95 and still couldn't sell it. We finally priced it at an even loonie and put it on the 'bargain table' in front of the store. We finally did manage to sell a few copies at that price, but we still had over half of our copies when I left the store.

I never attempted to read it, so I've no idea whether he was just a very poor writer or if it was the fact that he was, by the time of his retirement, the most unpopular PM in Canadian history. In fact, he was so unpopular that exactly four months after his resignation, his party, the Progressive Conservatives, were handed the worst defeat ever at the Federal level in the history of Canada, with EVERY PC MP standing for reelection defeated and returning only two MPs to Parliament.