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Tor is reshuffling its offices in the Flatiron Building. We’re about to be moved from the 14th to the 19th floor for some weeks, after which we’ll be moved to the 14th and part of the 13th floor. Marketing, Promotion, and Publicity will be getting the new territory.
The process is enough to give you nightmares about drowning in oceans of paper. In the meantime, if I may ask Making Light’s readers a hypothetical question:
Suppose that in a drawer of the desk used by the slush-opening-and-logging interns, one were to come upon a sheaf of International Reply Coupons more than two inches thick. The coupons are in two sizes, one about half the size of the other, and hail from everywhere from Brampton to Botswana.
What would happen if one were to present such a very large sheaf of coupons at one’s local post office? Would they deny all knowledge of them? Tell the bearer to bring them back on Annual Coupon Redemption Day? Demand that they be sorted by date or size or country, or at least counted? Declare that some of them have expired? Unflinchingly offer to swap the lot of them for U.S. postage stamps?
Inquiring minds need to know.
Perhaps one could mail ones various subscribers pieces of a puzzle, to then be put together via various means, rather like a rolling geocache.
Trade them for a single Interstellar Reply Coupon.
"Trade them for a single Interstellar Reply Coupon."
That made coffee come out my nose! Thanks for the laugh.
If your local post office is anything like mine, the clerk will have to ask someone what's going on.....
Generally, you SHOULD get some postage from them. How much is up in the air, depending on the age of the IRCs...
An International Reply Coupon Primer
And from the US Postal Service
What are international reply coupons?
International reply coupons (IRCs) provide a convenient method for you to prepay replies from foreign countries. You can send your correspondent one or more coupons. Your correspondent exchanges the coupon for postage in his or her country. One coupon in the United States is exchangeable in any other participating member country for a stamp or stamps representing the minimum postage required for an unregistered airmail letter. If you are sending something that requires more postage than a standard letter, you should inquire with the appropriate foreign postal administration about how many IRCs will be needed to complete your transaction.
With my experience with post offices, if you're wanting to do something peculiar that may involve actually talking to the local postmaster, the best bet is to visit a small town post office of some quaint and affluent bedroom community where they have the time and will be delighted by the novelty of the task at hand, as opposed to cranky and stressed out at you holding up the line. Or you can try your local post office at a non-crunch time, especially if you're on a first-name basis with the clerks.
Well, one could artfully apply them to one's body and ask for a post-paid trip to the continent of one's choice.
But seriously, I thought you had to present them with a mail piece, but the USPS website simply says that they are valid if issued after 1975 and exchangable for airmail postage at a value depending on when they were issued. I've only ever had one to redeem, though, and it confused the heck out of the postal clerk.
Suggest with all the usual Postal Service politeness that someone has been running a Ponzi Scheme?
I posted the main part of your question on this website for philatelists:
http://www.kbnet.com/book/html/frajolaboard.html
It might distracted my friends there from a comically acrimonious discussion of the types of paper used to print stamps in the US late in the 19th century.
Try sending back the Iron-60, per this breaking story:
Exploded Star Possibly Affected Human Evolution
Mon Nov 8, 3:01 PM ET
Science - Space.com
Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
SPACE.com
A star that exploded about nearly three million years ago left traces of debris on Earth and might have affected the course of human evolution, a new study suggests.
When particles from the explosion bombarded Earth's atmosphere over a long stretch of time, climate change could have forced early humans to fan out in search of food, the reasoning goes....
[and crank up your word processors, Science Fiction writers and Sci-Fi screenwriters!]
I have had a similar experience a number of times -- perhaps not quite as many IRCs, but certainly a wide geographic and temporal range. And have tried three different post offices. I'm talking about the Australian PO, but I imagine my experience isn't completely irrelevant. One post office refused to accept any coupon that was more than six months old or that didn't have a date stamp on it (as a small but significant number didn't). One quite happily gave us the value of the coupons in international stamps. One would only honour coupons sufficient to send the overseas mail we had with us at the counter. The most cooperative and flexible office was at a mail exchange which had very little counter traffic; the least was in a small office in a suburban shopping centre, which was also the place where we did least business. If I remember correctly, in all three places, time and again, the person behind the counter would have to ask for advice. I got quite good at helping them interpret what their screen was asking of them, though of cuorse the curmudgeonly ones were't interested and certainly weren't open to my telling them that the rules allowed them to give me stamps.
We are now unwaveringly vigilant in my office, and never accumulate more than two weeks worth of IRCs without a redemptive visit.
Oh, dear, the IRC stash. Perhaps if you took it to the main post office a few blocks uptown they would at least know what to do with it, even if they're probably really swamped with customers.
And I think another question worth considering is what exactly you plan to do with the not insignificant number of stamps you'll get in return. I mean, you could probably paper a small room with the number of stamps you're going to get for those IRCs.
I knew it.
My IRCs are in that pile.
What is this, let's make all the paranoid fantasies real week?
All the time as I forced the little old ladies in the post office in Sketty to get IRCs from head office, when I was the only person who had ever ordered them in the hundred and forty years of the post office's existence, I suspected that in fact the editors to whom I was sending them would just shove them in a drawer and never look at them again.
Not only was my work going to be rejected, but the whole ghastly effort of getting those damn IRCs, the times I went home again because they didn't have any IRCs today, and all those horrified looks ("Oh no, it's Mrs. Walton carrying a manuscript again, surely it's your turn to serve her,") all that shuffling was in fact for nothing. Thank goodness the ladies in the post office don't know, the shock would probably kill them. They thought their whole effort was vindicated when I sold a novel and I started to send back copyedits and proofs. They felt their struggle with the IRCs had been worthwhile. Little did they know I sold it in email. Don't disillusion them!
IRCs are in fact a pyramid scheme or something of that nature, where you spend money now (way more than postage costs) in the hope that one day they will be worth something to somebody. I expect the post office keeps the money and uses it to paint pillar boxes red or something useful of that nature.
I've had IRC nightmares, you know. There's no wonder I have a phobia about printing things out and sending them off.
I think you ought to send those poor IRCs to all the foreign submitters in your slush pile. I think you ought to give them each a generous handful, and then they can get back into circulation as they send them off with other submissions to pile up in some other editorial drawer, like Newberry Fruits.
I knew it, dammit!
Jo Walton:
First of all, congratulations on your well-deserved World Fantasy Award!
Secondly, you're actually correct in the middle of being funny, just where people least expect the truth.
The "Ponzi Scheme"
Copyright © 1996, Mark C. Knutson
AKA IRC: the Dark Side.
Jo - I believe that the US Postal Service uses the proceeds from unredeemed IRCs to buy Segway scooters for letter carriers. Either that or extra sessions at rudeness school for their counter service staff.
What are Newberry Fruits? A quick web search produced numerous sites vituperating them, another site that mentions they are no longer available, but no explanations of what they are.
I used to cash those in all the time when I worked at Penguin. Best thing to do is take them a reasonable pile at a time. They're supposed to give you air mail stamps in return.
I think there might be some sort of expiration date, though, you'd have to check on that.
how long have you been in your current offices? this move is going to kill you -- and right after you've moved house, too. yik.
p.s. i think our assistants throw out the ircs.
As noted by numerous others, most of the time a clerk will be uncertain what to do with an IRC. It's a pretty rare occurrence for most of them.
Sorta like going to a tire shop and asking one of the tire-changers to rebuild a carburetor.
Duh! I'm an idiot. Count 'em and list 'em on eBay:
http://search.ebay.com/International-Reply-Coupon_W0QQbsZSearchQQcatrefZC6QQfromZR2QQgotopageZQQlopgZQQsacategoryZQ2d1QQsapricehiZQQsapriceloZQQsatitleZQ22InternationalQ20ReplyQ20CouponQ22QQsbrftogZ1QQsofocusZbsQQsosortorderZ2QQsosortpropertyZ2QQsotrZ2
Start the whole kaboodle at $1. I bet they'll do well, especially if you list some of the countries represented.
Thanks to the magic of TinyURL (dot com), Greg's screen-warpingly long web address becomes....
! Ta-da !
(Why yes, I am a little snot. Thanks for noticing!)
Jonathan's "Interstellar Reply Coupon" comment, of course, brings Hayford Peirce's short story "Mail Supremacy" to mind.
The tinyurl for tinyurl.com is longer than their URL! It is http://tinyurl.com/u
Christopher Davis:
Or Dr. Christine Carmichael's
A SCORPION-TAILED ROMANCE
[Space & Time, ed. Gordon Linzner, No.82,
pp.86-92, Fall 1993] ISSN 0271-2512
Her story also relates to the Epic Guidelines Particle. Anyone have a comment on her story for me to pass on to her?
The tinyurl for http://tinyurl.com/u is http://tinyurl.com/7uw !
I'm dying of curiosity: Why does Tor have all these IRCs? If aspiring authors send them in their mss submission packages along with a self-addressed envelope, wouldn't the IRCs get used when Tor sends out the rejection letters? (I know I'm going to feel really stupid when you point out the obvious answer that everyone else seems to have clued into, but what the heck -- I'm used to it.)
Were you perhaps affected by the bending of time in L-Space, and wanted to have a glancing reference to Terry Prachett's new book?
Greg:
IIRC, Newberry Fruits were soft fruit jellies with a liquid centre, sold in boxes like chocolates. Because they contained almost no natural ingredients they were about half the price of an equivalently-sized box of chocolates, and thus much in demand as gifts for people one didn't particularly like. Presumably, this also made them a top choice for corporate gifts from printers and the like.
I rather liked them, and I'm sorry they've gone - they were the only sweet I know of that included goosberry as a standard flavour.
It seems to stabilize at 22 characters. The tinyurl for http://tinyurl.com/7uw is http://tinyurl.com/8ee
It's really cruel and unusual pubishment for the moving people to allow David only 4 cartons to move office.
On the other hand, as his wife, I sure wish I could set that kind of limit!
Fran: my bet would be that it was easier to just pay the postage to return the things than bother messing about with the hard-won IRCs the poor struggling foreign authors had hand-hewn from the primeval IRC stratae in their homelands.
Greg: Newberry Fruits are a disgusting kind of candy, in a box. When I was a child, we were regularly given a box for Christmas, which we would re-wrap and pass on to someone else, who doubtless did the same. We must at some point have opened and eaten one, or I wouldn't remember how disgusting they are, but the point of the joke is that the box is in endless circulation.
I'm thrilled to know Sam liked them -- it's logical that there was an end point and consumption, and he must have been it.
In Lancaster, England, in the late eighties and early nineties, we played this game with WRATH OF KHAN photonovels, but that's another story.
Sharyn: You too! It's a conspiracy!
Editors generally: Couldn't you just tell foreign contributors to give you an email address for free and speedy rejections, thus reducing the IRC mountains?
I feel kind of bad now - if it wasn't for me then all those boxes of Newberry Fruits might still be circulating.
Just for the record, though, I'd like it to be known that I draw the line at "Wrath of Kahn" photonovels.
Hams use IRCs a lot, and they can be sometimes sold in that market for more than the redemotion value, but for less then the PO sells them.
They do have to be date stamped properly, and some number aren't due to ignorance on the part of the issuing clerk.
I have a number that I've received for QSL cards, too.
Ah, Newberry Fruits are the English equivalent of fruitcakes!
Shockingly, the English actually eat fruitcakes.
Then again, they eat things called Bubble and Squeak and Spotted Dick too.
Shockingly, the English actually eat fruitcakes.
I eat fruitcakes, too, and I'm American.
I have an old friend who's a window clerk at an NYC USPS station. Perhaps he could help you. I'll talk to you soon.
I eat fruitcakes and I'm an American. My wife is already pressuring me to start on this year's batch.
I love fruitcake, as long as it has been appropriately brandied. Fruitcake should have a couple of cups of brandy per cake, and it should soak in the brandy for about 6 months. (My mother, who doesn't drink, used to bake a couple of cakes in June and keep them at the back of the fridge until Xmas.) The non-alcoholic versions are lame.
Your building has a 13th floor?
too noo noo noo noo (my version of twilight zone theme)
Do they all look the same? Or are they like stamps: each country with its own IRC design? I've only ever seen one, years ago, when I was a boy, when I used write away to international shortwave broadcasters to ask them for stickers.
Thanks, Robert.
Grant, they come in two varieties, but within those categories they all look alike. For some reason, the larger sort has a picture on it of a child who's a ringer for the young Shirley Temple. They're all in French.
Jo, this is not as old an accumulation as you might imagine.
The real problem is that we no longer have our own mailroom. If we can't weigh a manuscript, and look up how much it costs to mail it back to its owner in Grand Fenwick, we can't figure out how many stamps to put on it. It would take a lot of time to get that info from the mail room. On the other hand, it takes no time at all to toss the returning manuscript onto the outgoing mail stack. Thus it happens. But back when we had our own mail room, we really did use the stamps on Tor mail.
Thanks to Mr. Ponzi, it's now against postal regulations to exchange more than 10 IRCs at one time.
There's a contest idea: design an IRC for Grand Fenwick. A cask of wine with crossed longbows, overlaid on the AEC symbol?
Kevin Andrew Murphy said:
the best bet is to visit a small town post office of some quaint and affluent bedroom community where they have the time and will be delighted by the novelty of the task at hand
I have just the post office, if you're interested. It's in Bristow, Virginia in the middle of an empty field. Most of the time the employees sit in back and watch soap operas because they have so little to do. If you're bored too, they let you in back and you can sit and watch with them.
Just how far is that from Old Town Manassas? The main post office gets pretty crowded some times. Technically, Bristow starts just a bit further from me than the main Manassas post office.
"Then again, they eat things called Bubble and Squeak and Spotted Dick too."
But those sound harmless, or at least Mostly Harmless. But they also eat Toad in the Hole, leaving one wondering if every English cook has a six-year-old boy (and not Little Lord Fauntleroy either) who they ask to name new dishes.
Re fruitcake: I hear some of the best fruitcake is the stuff made by these monks in Kentucky using the local whiskey. See http://www.monks.org/
(I like the bourbon fudge they make, myself.)
Then again, they eat things called Bubble and Squeak and Spotted Dick too.
Not to mention Faggots in Sauce.
Katherine, dear, everyone got only four boxes. My imagination makes me wish I could have been there to see it. My sense of self-preservation makes me really happy to be 2500 miles away.
I also eat fruitcakes. But it's way to late to start them for this year. Anything you bake this month would be for next year.
T., you could give the IRCs to the mailroom, and let them figure out what to do with them. It would be the proper way to dispose of them.
Oops. Sorry - just saw that CHip has already noted that comestible :)
Does "Pie Floater" have double meaning -- or indeed meaning at all -- to anyone not Australian?
Epacris: "pie floater" has had a meaning to me ever since I read The Last Continent.
Sarah wrote:
And I think another question worth considering is what exactly you plan to do with the not insignificant number of stamps you'll get in return.
Bestow them on those who open the travel-stained packages the coupons arrive in -- the interns.
If the Chistianists in Tennessee legislated "pi" to be equal to 3, in order to make Math homework easier, and because the Bible tells of a circle 10 cubits across and 30 cubits around; and if someone put that into a computer, and transformed it into Floating Point arithmetic as 3.0 rather than 3.141592653589793238462643383279501971...; then: would that someone be a "Pi Floater?"
Or is that just more of Emperor Bush II's "fuzzy math?"
OK--my friend at the Post Office says that you can exchange IRCs for stamps good for the minimum postage to a foreign country, i.e., for 80¢ worth of stamps apiece, at any post office. You don't need to actually be mailing a letter. You can't exchange them for cash. I would count them and add up the total, and maybe take it in something like a combination of 20¢ and 1¢ stamps if they'll let you...more flexible that way. But at the very least you should be able to get a pile of 80¢ stamps...
Beth -- fruitcake doesn't \have/ to mature forever, especially if you start right by sousing the contents. My family used to spend most of Thanksgiving weekend+ chopping, shelling, and grinding, dumping the results in a huge pot and adding alcohol as we went. The result was baked on Sunday, mixed with just enough batter so that the cooked cake wouldn't fall into its components when \carefully/ cut into 1" cubes. It tended to evaporate at holiday parties.
If you haven't had your fill of strangely named english dishes, may I suggest Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books? The captain's table often bears quite wonderfully named dishes, such as "Drowned Baby". (I think that even beats "Lady fingers", whatever they are.)
Jonathon: Could faith-based maths explain problems with targeting & such in the Star Wars Defence System?
Re fruitcakes (edible version <g>) this brings back memories of when I used to send a friend who'd moved to inland Brazil a home-baked Christmas Cake. I'd cook it, soak it in quite a bit of sherry &/or brandy (sometimes a dash of whisk[e]y), wrap it in many layers of greased paper, brown paper, a bit of foil, seal in a tin, label carefully & post off by seamail quite a few months before in order to get there in time. It apparently matured quite well during the voyage.
Epacris:
"[Jonathan]: Could faith-based maths explain problems with targeting & such in the Star Wars Defence System?"
Yes. I think the problem began with budgeting $666,666,666 for the Phase I study. But the Pentagon promises to spend less than $666,666,666,666 for the total R&D, deployment, operations, and maintenance. Or that's what I heard was said at an Ashcroft Prayer Breakfast.
I just noticed that a lot of 145 USED International Reply Coupons (all from Czechoslovakia) sold for $1,100 in an auction in New Jersey on the weekend. ( Here, if anyone cares.) Hmmm.
... I think.
And should get the boot
Hello out there. For everyone's information, many of these things are valuable to collectors; particularly in Europe where some of can often bring up to €150 or more.
You're welcome to check with me for free advice.
Hello out there. For everyone's information, many of these things are valuable to collectors; particularly in Europe where some of can often bring up to €150 or more.
You're welcome to check with me for free advice.
Nothing personal, Peter, but messages like yours put me instantly in High Scam Alert mode.
Mr. Robin is registered with the American Philatelic Society as a dealer, for whatever that's worth, and people are certainly selling IRCs on eBay for respectable sums.
It would be more interesting if it was a Ponzi scheme.
Ref. #67 by James MacDonald. I am pleased that there was nothing personal about your comment. If you care to do some research on me, please contact the American Philatelic Society in Bellefonte, PA 16823. Ask them to confirm that I have been a member in good standing #201320 since 2004 or so. I am also a published(self)author on the subject. You might also care to click onto eBay and call up "reply coupon" and see how many are being offered from week to week.
Caution is a good thing, but can lead to a few missed opportunities every now and then.
Very best wishes to all, Peter Robin
At the moment I am collecting is International of Reply Coupon since year 1968, altogether have used From some state in European Continent, American, Australian Austrian, African, Asian and Australian Austrian Amount to 125 IRC'S all the that its Target to Dily Timor Potruguese and now is Timor Leste.
This Collection have been presented by at exhibition in Honggaria 1995 and get Silver certificate.
If there are any enthusiastic is I will Sell it.
Collect this very rareness, because addressed to one state of is target of and differ the date of its arrival.
Price earn in negotiation of is including Certificate
Johny S Pandie
e-mail : jspandie@yahoo.com
It looks as though the poster is trying to sell one of us a collection of IRCs.
Yeah, I saw that, but see also the two posts from Peter Robin, above.
Is Je Bandung's comment IRC As She Is Spoke?
hello,anyone know how many Philippine minimun international reply envelope i will enclose in sending a manuscript to usa? please help. thanks in advance.
Tess:
You'll have to ask at the post office. (See post #4 above.)
Tess @78: Philpost will need to know how much your manuscript weighs and how big your parcel is, so weight it beforehand or bring it with you when you ask them.
The best places to ask are the major post offices; if you're in Manila, go to either the Manila or Makati central post offices if you can, because they handle these sorts of requests more often than the smaller ones.
This place is awesome.
I have often observed the phenomenon of "Google for the question that you want an answer to, then post your question on the first site which allows posting." I haven't often seen them get specific and precise answers. All power to the commentariat.