WRITERS ABROAD MAGAZINE
RSVP An Article by Jany Graf
‘Are you sure you really want some?’ the girl behind the counter at the post office
asks, pale and wide-eyed.
‘Yes. I'd like three please.’
‘Well, I'll have to ask...’ She disappears into a back room. The queue behind
me...Well, let's not go there...
After a mere 15 minutes, she returns clutching a large brown envelope, from
which she removes a smaller brown envelope, which contains a thin wad of IRCs.
Real live IRCs, held together with a paperclip, so they won't escape.
Remember IRCs? International Reply Coupons? Back in the internet-less day,
with no email, they were the tickets to getting your writing on an editor's desk in the
UK to be read by same, and if he/she didn`t like what they saw, they at least had the
financial means to return it. Editors or competition organisers would open your
envelope, shake out the contents, and if a couple of them didn`t drop out, everything
was binned. Even JKR wouldn't have stood a chance without IRCs if she'd been
living in foreign parts. Making a phone call to a publication in the UK or anywhere
abroad, to find out if your offering was going to be published, was an expensive
undertaking, the cost of which one had to deduct from any potential earnings. It
could make a big hole in a cheque for 25 quid.
So you weighed your envelope on the kitchen scales, calculated how much the
return postage would be in sterling, with the help of 10 fingers and a Post Office
leaflet which someone had sent you from the UK in 1975, converted that amount into
your own currency — in my case Deutsch Marks — and then set of on a postal
expedition.
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