Backwards Books
As jarich pointed out to me, it wasn't the Template Toolkit (Badger) book that required 6-8 weeks to arrive, it was Data Munging with Perl that needs to be ordered in specially every time -- just as davorg had expected.

The universe is how it should be.

I had become confused since we had previously shipped a number of Data Munging with Perl books to our clients, whereas this was the first time I recall us shipping badger books.