Shipping Books From a Spare Room

The Tallow & Rivet distribution network is a table. It is a pasting table from a decorator's van, ten feet long, with a roll of brown paper at one end and a postage scale at the other. Orders go in on a clipboard, and the books go out in a box.

This is how it works, and where it nearly doesn't.

The routine

On Fridays Dov does the packing, and the rest of us leave him alone. He comes in at eight with a flask. The orders from the week are on the clipboard. He pulls the books from the shelf, checks each against the list, slides them into a card mailer and tapes the flap. He weighs the parcel, writes the weight on the corner, and puts it in the crate. By two o'clock the crate is full and the post office van arrives.

It is not complicated. Almost every mistake we have made has come from trying to make it more so.

The box problem

Books are heavy and awkward. They corner badly and they hate being crushed. The most common thing to go wrong is a damaged corner, and a damaged corner is an unhappy reader and a refund.

We settled on three sizes. A flat card mailer for one paperback. A deeper one for two or three. A proper box for five or more, with a sheet of cardboard folded around each pair. The card mailers cost us a lot more than the plastic ones, and we use them anyway, because a plastic bag holds a soggy corner like a grudge.

The week that ate us

Last autumn, ten orders arrived on the same morning from the same address in another country. Ten orders for ten books, to be sent to ten different people, each needing its own customs form. It took us the whole week. We were not charged enough for postage, and we did not find out until the invoices turned up a month later.

We now check every overseas order against the postage tables before we accept it, and we have a rule: no international orders over four books without an email first. It is not friendly. It is survival.

What we got wrong about stock

Early on, we kept the books in the order of the print run. It made sense on paper. In practice, it meant digging through the middle of a pallet when someone ordered the second title, then hoisting the whole stack back. We now shelve everything by title, at eye level, with a pencilled count on the end of each row.

It sounds obvious. Everything obvious has to be learned once.

The thing nobody warns you about

Books occupy an astonishing amount of room. A pallet is a thousand copies and about the size of a small fridge. We have six titles in print. The spare room at the back of the surgery is full, the old waiting room is full, and the cupboard under the stairs has started to lean.

Which is why I look at the monthly numbers, nervously, and wonder how many more titles we can survive. If you'd like to help clear a shelf, you know where the catalogue is: take a look.

Names, places and events in this demo are fictional.