Bookselling and publishing

An English reader meets remittieren and thinks of money, because to remit is what a customer does with a payment and a remittance is the sum that arrives. In this trade the German verb moves goods instead: die Buchhandlung remittiert means the shop sends copies it could not sell back to the publisher, and what comes the other way is a credit note. Both words go back to the Latin remittere, to send back, and English keeps that sense only in the law, where a case can be remitted to a lower court. On a shop floor the two directions are opposite, so a bookshop that remittiert is recording sales it did not make, not settling a bill. The copies themselves are die Remittenden, and the right to return them is what lets a small shop stock a debut it is unsure of.