One of the pleasures of attending writing conferences is getting books by your students and colleagues signed. It’s the equivalent of the autographs in your high school yearbook — mementos of a cherished time together.

The only problem is lugging the books home. I never check my roller bag, and if I’ve loaded it with books, sometimes it takes all my strength to heft it into an overhead bin.

This year, I decided to mail a few books home instead. At the end of July, I packed four of them into an oversized manila envelope and dropped them off at a post office in Tennessee. I used media mail; it’s slower but comes at a bargain price. Because I’ve used this class of service in the past without any problems, I was confident my books would arrive in a couple of weeks or so.

As August arrived and then deepened, I noticed other conference attendees sharing on social media that their book purchases had arrived. Maybe they’d opted for first-class mail? But nothing arrived at my house.

I eagerly checked the mailbox every day and even called the originating post office a couple times. The clerk told me to wait a bit longer. I also went online and filed a search request for missing mail, cursing myself for failing to get a tracking number.

“I bet it will arrive late,” my husband said. “Months from now. It’s probably sitting somewhere, and someone will find it.”

Could be, I thought. After all, sometimes lost letters get delivered decades later. I pictured my package, sitting on a dimly lit shelf, waiting to be found, waiting to be reunited with me — a cozy vision.

Then, in early September, about five weeks after I’d sent off the books, I received a letter from the San Francisco Network Distribution Center, based in Richmond.

It contained a scrap torn from the envelope, which included the return and mailing addresses, as well as the canceled postage. Somewhere on its journey, 2,400 miles as the crow flies, the envelope had burst open, and the precious paperbacks were scattered.

The letter was conciliatory: “We realize how important your mail is and you have every right to expect your mail to be delivered intact and in good condition. You can be assured that we are constantly striving to improve our mail processing methods in order to prevent damage of our customer’s mail. … Please accept our sincere apology for any inconvenience this matter may have caused you.”

It also informed me that all “loose-in-the-mail” items are sent to the Mail Recovery Center in Atlanta, Ga., which holds the lost goods from 30 to 120 days.

I filled out another parcel search request, a form that struck a snippier tone: “Experience has shown that proper packaging, including the name and address with the contents inside the parcel in most instances will avoid this inconvenience. To assure our customers a service they deserve it is suggested that these measures be taken in future mailings.”

Well. Under “identifying features,” I wrote, “All books are personally inscribed to me on the title page.”

My hopes winked out when I looked into the fates of the 67 million items the center receives annually. According to a 2020 report by the Postal Service inspector general, the facility was inefficient and poorly tracked its inventory, which ended up recycled, trashed or auctioned off for millions of dollars a year via GovDeals, a government surplus website.

Auction winners can score electronics on the cheap — or, I guess, a searing memoir, a satire or a collection of speculative short stories.

If someone snags my paperbacks, I hope they’ll realize it’s a treasure and not a lump of coal. Or maybe I’ll experience a Christmas miracle, with my lost books arriving just in time.

Have you ever recovered lost mail? Scored a deal from the GovDeals auction site? Please send me your story, and I may share in a future column.

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