One thing we do is mail the magazines ourselves. If there's a subscription card in one of your magazines, it's because one of us put it in there by hand. We put all the mags into envelopes. We lug them to the post office. We mail via bulk mail, which is cheap and it's cheap because we do half the work for the postal service. We have to sort all the mail by zip code, bundle them in very specific ways following arcane rules. Hell, even the way you rubber band the bundles has to be exact (lengthwise first, then short ways next). It took us 4 to 5 hours on Saturday to complete this task. And yesterday Stefanie the Art Director drove them over to the post office.

So, subscribers, they're on their way to you now. They should be in all our Bay Area bookstores by this weekend. And they should get to bookstores in other parts of the country the first or second week of May (let's just say the second week to be safe). Our gratitude to Ann Ninh, our bulk mail mistress, who oversaw the whole production. Thank you Ann! You’re the best!

Hope y’all like the new issue. Send comments to us at hyphen@hyphenmagazine.com