Warning: Contents Indecipherable

The first round of signed bookplates, about 800 or so, have been sent out. Another 1,200 should be mailed within a week or two. Thanks for your requests and especially your patience. It turns out, however, that the reward may not be worth the wait. Here is an e-mail from one recent bookplate recipient:

Thank you very much for the signature bookplate which I received today. And you got them in the mail before the postal rate increase. You might want to give your readers a heads up on the fact that they are coming and what they looked like. It took me a while to figure out what it was. I got an envelope from William Morrow with a sticker and some nearly illegible scribbling on it. Nothing else – no explanation. I was thinking about going to my pharmacist to see if she could decipher it. (Any real data behind the doctor’s bad handwriting story?) I eventually figured out that it was my long awaited Freakonomics signature bookplate. But I was a bit confused for a while.

It’s true that our signatures are both pretty scraggly. It’s also true, however, that the next round of bookplates are actually specially printed Freakonomics bookplates, replete with the apple/orange thingy, so that should cut down on confusion.