BOMC was strictly a mail-order operation. You got a little card in the mail every month that told you what the main selection was. If you weren't interested in the main selection, you could choose from a list of alternates. If you forgot to send your card in, or sent it late, the main selection would be mailed to you automatically. So BOMC was not a good deal for people who were busy, or who frequented bookstores, or who knew what they wanted.

However, it was a good deal for certain types of people: shut-ins, mainly. Or people who lived in ghost towns of the southwest. Agoraphobes. Indecisive people. Transylvanian counts. Gatsbyesque characters who were into self-improvement. Residents of strict Islamic countries where access to porn was banned. People who would read anything. You get the idea.

You might think that Book-of-the-Month Club would be a bucolic, intellectually stimulating place to work, full of bookish, interesting people who delighted in ideas and wordplay and saw their business as an opportunity for service, a mission to bring literacy and enlightenment to the benighted provinces of the world.

You would be wrong.

In fact, BOMC was a wildly dysfunctional den of intrigue, paranoia and inefficiency. Most employees were dimwits and screwups; most managers were backbiting incompetents. The human resources department existed mainly to bamboozle sexually-harassed employees into believing that they had no rights under the law.

At one point a company vice-president was fired, and this was handled in much the same way that the Soviet Union might handle the firing of a senior official: the person in question simply vanished one day, and when people began asking questions about her whereabouts, the HR department grudgingly issued a terse statement saying that she had suddenly decided it was time for her to resign so that she could walk the entire length of the Appalachian Trail. There was a peculiar finality to that phrase, as if she had sent on a death march. She was erased from the photographs, she had ceased to be. She had become an unperson. Within the company we jokingly referred to people who'd been terminated as "walking the Appalachian Trail". It was a ghost road, a trail from which you never returned.

All this came back to me as I read the deeply weird story of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who has been missing since last Thursday after checking out an SUV from the state's law enforcement division. He told no one where he was going -- not his wife, not his security detail. After several days of mixed messages and conflicting stories, his staff announced that he had been "walking the Appalachian Trail", which after all these years sent shivers down my spine.

Good God, no. Not that. He has a wife and kids, you know.