Subscribers everywhere will be pleased to know that the latest installment is in the mail. We spent all day Saturday at the dining room table—folding letters, stamping and stuffing envelopes, and making cryptic notations in our subscriber notebook.

The mailing process is where the well-oiled machine that is Idiots’Books is most profoundly threatened by shoddy infrastructure. Our system is slow and inefficient. It is probably deserving of some hearty mockery. We are not exercising “best practice.” We are not taking advantage of prevailing technologies.

Both Robbi and I hold out the naive hope that our Fairy Database Godmother will one day fly in the window and teach us how to automate. But for now, we get to spend one day every other month in white-knuckled consternation, clinging fearfully to our prehistoric paper records, hoping that we don’t screw up.

At the end of every mailing session, the result looks something like this.

An extra bin has been added this time around, on the strength of the 70 new subscribers who joined the fold between this mailing and the last. Sometimes a little press goes a long way.