Why I can't call my autobiography "Profiles In Courage"

I guess it's still going on, people breaking their necks to run to the bookstore (the store down by the mall where they have to sell coffee just to make ends meet) to buy a copy of "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," the tell-all book by Michael Wolff that purports to tell all about the House of Thrills at 1600 Pennsylvania Av in Washington, D.C.

Hip Kindle types downloaded the book in record numbers as well.

I haven't bought it and don't plan to read it (I have a book backlog like you wouldn't believe, and books about Walter Winchell and Jackie "The Jokeman" Martling require my attention more urgently.)

But I love stories in which some guy makes an accidental fortune, like the gas-station attendant named Clark Bentley who wrote a song called "Yesterday All Day Long Today," which you never heard, but which was recorded by Jeannie C. Riley on the 'b' side of "Harper Valley P.T.A." The people who dole out the money in the record business can't be expected to figure out why people bought a billion copies of Harper Valley in 1968, so they shell out royalty money equally between the writer of the hit side and the other side that no one ever listened to. So Clark Bentley made some folding money on that, same as Tom T. Hall, who wrote the song everybody sang that summer.

Randall Hansen made some money the easy way too, because people are so doggone hurried when they click on Amazon to order books and whatnot.

You see, in 2010, Hansen, who is currently the interim Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, wrote a book called "Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945" which suddenly saw a giant bump in sales of late, and we have to assume that although there may be a couple of dozen people who were into reading about Allied bombing raids on Nazi Germany in World War II, the vast majority of these people were as disappointed when they opened their box from Amazon as they would have been had they thought they were checking "ice cream sundae" on an elective menu, but really checked "braunschweiger sandwich" instead.

Dr Hansen was one of the people who noticed what happened. When he saw that the Trump book had the same title as his own, he looked at the Amazon sales charts, and saw that his tome had "moved from very, very low sales onto three [of Amazon’s] best-seller lists." And Amazon sold every last copy they had.

No one knows if they will print more. Or why they would.

And if your real name is Harry Potter, now would be a great time to publish your memoirs.