San Francisco, California
October 17, 2000

Dear Readers,

Yesterday’s editor’s letter, which mostly concerned our announcement that you can now read Open Letters on a Palm Pilot, provoked this response from Miriam Toews, of Winnipeg, Manitoba:

I like that idea of holding someone’s words in the palm of my hand, too, but here in the ‘Peg you get yerself one of them Palm Pilots and you die, man, you are so dead, you are mobbed, you are lynched, and your name is mocked for all eternity. Seriously, if I was feeling suicidal I’d get a Palm Pilot and wander down Pembina Highway.

So if you live in Winnipeg, please take the possibility of death and/or mockery into account before clicking here and checking out our new handheld edition.

Miriam is of course the author of last Monday’s letter about studying psychology and making amends.

Amanda Joseph, of London, England, Europe, responded to our announcement more inscrutably, with this tiny drawing of a Palm Pilot:

Amanda is the South African-born artist whose pen-and-ink drawing “Falafel with humous & cucumber on a baguette” prettied up last week’s issue of the Open Letters weekly; precisely the sort of exclusive bonus that should really inspire you tosubscribe.

Speaking of the United Kingdom: author/activist Naomi Klein gave Open Letters a shout-out as her “favourite website” yesterday in an interview in the Guardian of London, which brought us a flurry of new British readers, to whom: welcome. Naomi is the author of No Logo, which this article says has been called “the Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement,” but which is in fact much, much less boring than Das Kapital. Coincidentally, in the same interview, Naomi says her favourite new album is “Kid A,” by Radiohead; tomorrow’s open letter, if all goes well, will be about the experience of working in a Chicago record store on the day of that record’s inexplicably frantic release.

I have plenty to say about today’s letter, including that it really was written in 1865, and that it will appear in next month’s issue of Harper’s Magazine, out this week, as part of a forum on reparations for slavery, but first: the bookstore plan.

As we first announced in last Sunday’s weekly, Open Letters is now available for sale, on paper, in select bookstores and newsstands around the continent. As of this week, copies of the weekly are for sale at St. Mark’s Books in Manhattan; BookPeople in Austin, Texas; Quimby’s in Chicago; One Stop News in Washington, D.C., and Atomic Books in Baltimore.

Right now, we’re providing printed copies to most of these stores. But at Atomic Books and BookPeople, they’ve already moved on to stage two, which is, we think, the more exciting one: there they receive the weekly version by email; print out and bind a few copies; and sell them to the people of Baltimore and Austin for a dollar or so apiece. They’ll keep all the revenue, to cover their printing costs.

I like this idea for two reasons. One is that it’ll enable readers without access to (or a fondness for) the Internet to read Open Letters.

The other is that it feels like the next step in the development of the “new kind of print magazine” that we described four months ago in this essay/manifesto. The method that Atomic Books and BookPeople have embraced is about the fastest and most efficient system of magazine distribution one can imagine: each issue can be available for sale in physical form, on bookshelves, about an hour after we finish proofreading it. And new copies can be printed as they’re needed, eliminating returns.

Our thanks to the owners and employees of the bookstores that have agreed to try this out, especially Scott Huffines atAtomic Books and Travis DeWitt atBookPeople – at this stage, the actual process of getting the magazine from email queue to magazine rack is certain to be kind of a hassle, with minimal financial returns, and we’re grateful to them for helping us with this experiment. So please patronize those bookstores.

And if you work for or own a bookstore (or coffee shop, or photocopying outlet, or bowling alley) and would like to take part, we extend the same offer to you: you can print out as many copies of the weekly as you like, and offer them for sale for whatever price you deem appropriate. You keep 100 percent of the proceeds, for now at least; we just want to know about it in advance, and to hear how it goes. If you’re interested, or would like to hear more, please email Susan Burton at susan@openletters.net.

(We’d especially like to extend that invitation to those of you outside of North America, just because it somehow seems even cooler to realize that the one-hour proofread-to-magazine-rack thing will work just as easily in Auckland and Osaka as it will in the heart of Texas.)

As for today’s letter: a few weeks ago, Jack Hitt sent it to me, with this note:

Since Open Letters is trying to revive the epistolary form, I wanted you to see a sidebar I dug up for my Slavery Reparations forum, which Harper’s will publish in November. It is a letter written in 1865 by a freed slave named Jourdon Anderson, in reply to his old Tennessee master, Colonel Anderson, who had asked Jourdon to return as a freeman and work the plantation once again, but for pay. The sentences are beautifully crafted, but also the narrative structure is simply brilliant in the way the writer brackets his anger and righteousness within the confines of a dignified modesty and even kindness. It is a small gem of American literature, and arguably one of the first and greatest briefs on behalf of reparations.

The forum that Jack’s talking about, which I haven’t seen yet, but which sounds very promising, appears in the November issue of Harper’s Magazine, which will be arriving on newsstands soon. Jack invited four of America’s sharpest trial lawyers to come together to discuss the mechanics, as well as the ethics, of a potential class-action lawsuit on behalf of African Americans against the United States government, seeking reparations for the institutional crime of slavery.

Jourdon Anderson’s letter, which originally appeared in The Freedmen’s Book, a collection of African-American writings compiled by the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child in 1865, will appear as a sidebar to the forum.

Tomorrow: Kid A, and a pledge by me to stop writing such long editor’s letters.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough