n 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