Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Cormorant Street ·
The Stamped But Not Sent
Stamped and addressed envelopes are filed un-sent by the office, and replies to them arrive and are entered.
- filed: "filed at the April requisition"
- reference: "CS/SB/09"
1. This writ concerns a filing series at the offices of Cormorant Street: the series of stamped, addressed, un-sent envelopes. The envelopes are first-class stamped, addressed by hand or typescript to the correspondent they were written for, and sealed. Nothing about an individual envelope requires this writ's attention. The series does.
2. The series arose by accretion. An office writes letters; the letters are franked, posted, and the envelope is done with. Now and again a letter is withdrawn before posting, superseded by a later letter, or held pending a figure. The withdrawn letter's envelope goes to the pending file. The pending file grew a drawer, the drawer grew a series, and the series now holds four hundred and eleven envelopes, sealed, stamped, addressed, none of them sent.
3. The registry's difficulty begins with the replies. Correspondents are answering the un-sent letters.
4. The replies arrive through the ordinary morning post, are date-stamped in the usual way, and are entered in the inward book against the file of the un-sent letter they answer. The inward clerk raises no query, because the letters refer to theirs plainly, in the manner of a second instalment: they begin in the middle, they thank the office for what was never written, they enclose documents keyed to a request that is still lying in a drawer four paces from where the reply is being read. The registry has compared dates. The replies uniformly post after the envelope they answer would have been delivered, had it been sent, by four to nine days. The post between this office and its correspondents takes three.
5. On first inquiry the correspondents were written to directly, on the office's normal note paper, asking them to confirm in what connection they had written. The confirmations have come back in the ordinary way. Each names the un-sent letter correctly: its date, its subject, in matters of the finer files its wording. No correspondent has claimed to have kept a copy. Copies are not kept, in the main, of the incoming class of letter that un-sent ones belong to; the registry concedes the point and moves past it.
6. The sealing of the un-sent letters has been verified by weight. A sealed and stamped letter weighs its fixed amount; a sealed envelope from this office weighed at twelve of the four hundred and eleven came in at the fixed amount to a tenth of a grain, which is the honest tolerance of the scales here. The registry records that whatever the correspondents are answering, it is not a copy that escaped.
7. No enquiry of the sorting office has resolved the matter of stamp and frank. The stamps on the four hundred and eleven are of the ordinary denominations, gummed down, and have never passed through a franker. Their gum, where it has been lifted under licence at the record store on two envelopes surrendered for the purpose, shows no cancellation, and the envelopes show no passage through any delivery of any sort. That these are in every material respect unposted is the registry's firm finding, entered twice.
8. A reply entered to an un-sent letter is filed at the letter's file, where the pair can be read together, the answer beside the question never asked. The series of pairs is now one hundred and ninety files. It is the registry's practice, settled long before this writ, never to close a file while correspondence is current. The pairs are current. The registry does not expect them to close.
9. The registry has decided against a test posting. A letter held four years and then posted would settle, in one direction, whether the envelope is the operating part or only the kept twin of something the office let go of by another road; but the registry is not willing, on the showing above, to introduce four hundred letters into the post at once, addressed to persons who in some cases have moved, died, or been amalgamated, and the registry is not willing to introduce one, because a series that answers back by the eights would answer quicker.
10. The next requisition for stamps is in May, on the ordinary form, and the store has raised the ordinary query against it, being four hundred and eleven short of the drawn pattern for a department of this size.
11. Which side of the requisition the post is being counted from.