Melville House Books

First, Wal-Mart cancelled orders for Jon Stewart‘s bestseller America (The Book) because it contained a photo of naked bodies with the heads of Supreme Court justices pasted on them. Now, according to Sara Nelson in a New York Post report that uses “it’s” as a possessive, the giant retailer is returning thousands of copies of George Carlin‘s bestseller When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops because, as spokesman Karen Burk explained, “We did not order this book. It was shipped to us in error by one of our distributors.” What’s more, exactly as with the Stewart book, even though the brick and mortar stores are not selling the book, the store’s website is. Meanwhile, as Nelson notes, it’s “unlikely” that thousands of books “would have been shipped from the warehouse by accident.” But, as she also notes, “Retailers can return any unsold books to the publisher or distributor, at any time, at the publisher’s expense.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.