The first time I remember hearing about the U.S. Postal Service’s special rate for books was when I was twelve and my family was moving from Connecticut back to my parents’ native Southern California. My father, before driving the moving truck across the country, shipped some thirty boxes of books to the house in California, using the subsidized Media Mail rate. I accompanied him on a few trips to the local post office across from a lumber yard, the stained carpeting of the back seat of his beige-colored Nissan Maxima piled with distended, heavily taped boxes. The postal workers knew him well.
It took him a week to drive the truck to California, but he managed to beat most of the boxes to the Golden State. Slowly, some a bit worse for wear, all except one of the thirty boxes made it to their destination.
In a country without much in the way of a state-funded culture industry on the European or even the Latin American model, U.S.P.S. Media Mail (inherited from the old book rate, established in 1938) is one of few widely accessible government subsidies accorded to intellectual life in the United States outside the universities. You accept slower delivery times and the possibility that the Postal Service may open your box to verify you are, in fact, shipping books or other media, and in exchange you pay about half of what you would otherwise.
This gift from the state to those who read mostly escapes notice in public discourse, garnering little attention in the defenses mounted by liberals and the left of a Postal Service that has been targeted for cuts by the right over the past decade. But its contributions are quietly significant. Media Mail was the secret to Amazon’s rise during its early years, when the service allowed the company, then primarily a book vendor, to ship its wares at a pittance. (This fits a general pattern of purportedly “disruptive” tech titans drawing their key early business advantage from the manipulation of government subsidies.) But it is not without its benefits to readers. It is still possible today to obtain a used paperback copy of most books for roughly four dollars, shipping included, via Amazon’s used platform or AbeBooks—which is how I, and my father before me, obtained the better part of the books in our respective libraries. A hereditary vice: I hear of a book, I order it for a few dollars, I forget about it, and two days later, or two months later, depending on the vagaries of Media Mail, it shows up on my doorstep.
Also like my father, I have relied on the service when moving from place to place, using it to spread out the labor involved in transporting what is, for me as for him, by far the bulkiest component of my mortal possessions.
I have had somewhat less luck than he has. When moving out of Washington, D.C., some years ago, on my way to London, I sent several boxes of books to my parents in California, only for my treasured Landmark Thucydides to be swapped, presumably in a botched inspection, with a boxed set of the Magic Schoolbus series of children’s books, to my chagrin and, presumably, that of the intended recipient of the Schoolbus series. On my latest move, from Manhattan to Charlottesville, Virginia, one box disappeared and another arrived torn open, the contents, mostly French theory, dampened by the rain that had soaked the East Coast during the box’s journey.
And yet, the process of going to the post office to send boxes of books in the leadup to a move is comforting to me. Interacting with the Postal Service in general is comforting—a way of touching base with an organ of the federal government that you can still actually visit and that still works, however haphazardly. And in this case, it seems to me like a way of dipping your toe into a move, taking little leaps of faith before the big one. It can feel like you have company in an otherwise solitary journey. Your little boxes—sometimes not so little—are journeying in parallel to you. But my most important books I don’t leave to the tender mercies of the Postal Service. I bring them with me, in the moving van or the suitcase.
