The Torch Bearer | Page 9

be arranged in districts that correspond to the mail
routing of the United States post office. This is an arbitrary dividing,
and it increases the work of finding the proper place for entering a
subscription. In this a post office chart has to be used constantly.
After an entry has been made in the mailing books, the subscription
order, before it is filed, goes to the subscription cards. There the clerks
must see whether the name is already on the books, or, if not, if it has
ever been on our books (In the latter case we revise the former card
instead of making a new one). The subscription cards look like the one
reproduced below.
[Illustration: Subscription Card]
Some letters that bring subscription orders contain many other items

that must be attended to before the order or letter is filed. For instance,
a letter may contain a new subscription, a renewal, a remittance or a
request to send a bill, an order for sample copies, for papers to sell at a
meeting, for literature, a request for information and an item or poem or
article for the columns of the paper. Each matter mentioned in the letter
must, of course, be attended to before the letter can go to the files. To
avoid having a letter filed before all of its orders or requests have been
attended to, we stamp each piece of mail with a little rubber stamp that
looks like the following:
A.S.B.....Bill
A.E.R.....Fin.
H.B.S.....Advt.
Date Received
Ackg......Sub.
Papers....Lit.
Circ......Amt. & page.
Every piece of first-class mail that reaches the office is stamped with
these abbreviations and is at once checked for the different stages
through which it must go before it is filed. The clerk filing must see
that every check on the stamp has a sign after the check to show that
the particular matter indicated has been attended to.
Of course, another part of the subscription work is in making changes
of address, changing dates of expiration and removing names of those
who do not want to continue to receive the paper, such as the
anti-suffragists, who do not want to be converted, to whom some
relative or friend or acquaintance has been sending the paper out of her
own pocket.
Then there is the work involved in getting subscribers to renew. When
the subscription list contained only twenty-four hundred names and
when there were few letters to write, it was possible to know the names
and perhaps something of the history of every subscriber, especially
since only a few were put on the books in a week. But with a
circulation of nearly thirty thousand it is obviously impossible for any
one person to give the whole list personal attention.
The result is that the business policy of the paper has had to be changed
a number of times to meet the changing needs. In the earlier days of the
paper it was thought that subscribers would watch the expiration date

on the wrapper of their paper and would send in the renewal price
without any kind of reminder. In those days Miss Wilde and her
assistant would go over the books twice a year and send a reminder to
all who had not renewed. As the list grew larger, this plan seemed
unsatisfactory to both the subscriber and the paper. Since people were
at liberty to start a subscription at any time in the year, it was plain that
a year's subscription would run out at the same time the following year,
and since this was going on twelve months in the year, we began
sending out bills each month to those subscribers whose subscriptions
were about to expire. That system was in operation from 1910 through
1915.
During 1915, it was made possible for us to have enough helpers in the
office to make a study of the Circulation Department with a view to
seeing where improvements could be made, what leakages could be
stopped, and what kind of circulation work was paying. The result was
that we decided that along with our efforts to get new subscriptions we
must carry on a new kind of work to keep those already obtained on our
books. We found that it was not sufficient simply to send the paper to a
person for a certain time and then ask her to renew. We found that we
needed to study the source of the subscription, the motive for
subscribing, and how best to appeal to the subscriber to renew. We
found that since we had been keeping the record (1910 through 1915),
about 26,000 persons have been on our books and for some reason or
other are no longer there. A careful study and a long one showed that
those whose papers had been discontinued in