The flier reached the library,
Where bibliographers
Decided it was certainly
What one who reads prefers.

They told the Acquisitions folk
To get it right away:
At this, an orderer awoke,
And brought his skills to play.

A long delay ensued, until
At last the printers brought
It out, and finally moved to fill
The order, as they ought.

The book arrived, was invoiced, paid,
And sent to underlings,
On whom the onus had been laid
For cataloging things.

The catalogers looked on-line
For copy, but no traces
Did they perceive: they saw no sign
In any databases.

Averse to cataloging it
From scratch, and feeling snubbed
That no one else had yet seen fit
To, they said "'Twill be pubbed!"

They stickered it, trucked it away
To moulder in the stacks,
And turned to other tasks that may
Have else slipped through the cracks.

But nobody can ever find
Pub books, at least unaided,
And no one did. Soon, any kind
Of interest in it faded.

A couple years when by, and then
To them the book returned,
They searched for copy once again,
But once again were burned.

So they were forced to tackle it,
And did, despite their sorrow,
And it went back to stacks, to sit
For somebody to borrow.

It waited twenty years for one,
Till one day the deciders
Who weed the stacks discovered none
Had touched the thing but spiders.

So they agreed that it should go,
And asked "Who ordered this?
There's nobody who reads it, so
There's something much amiss!"

Though for another year or two
Its fate was still in doubt,
At length a person came and threw
The tattered volume out.

Of course, as soon as that was done,
The book was missed, and then,
Because some patron wanted one,
We ordered it again.