The thing about the Great Comet book is that I never saw it in the store - I would have leafed through it - until heading down after calling my local Barnes & Noble to find out about the $2 clearance yesterday. The guy who answered the phone said there were 11 books left, and they "wouldn't hold it," which made me chuckle - because the odds of people lining up to get a copy of a closed Broadway coffee table book in California were zero.
Seeing the stacks of shrink-wrapped books on the clearance rack, more than any other book there, was a bit sad, a bit symbolic of the misguided commercial decisions by the producers (and in this case, the book publisher).
But I loved the show, perhaps a little bit more because it was a flop that has essentially vanished except in my memory. And Dave Malloy has influenced my recent reading habits. I grabbed the Comet book and am in the middle of Moby-Dick (one of those novels I long meant to read, but which I was partially inspired to actually tackle because I know he's written a musical about it).
Herman Melville died a failure, too.