...I am sure the magazines were sent via Media Mail which will take an awful long time...
The magazines for USA were
reportedly sent via bulk rate mail, not media mail. Media mail only makes sense for items with a bit of weight to them, such as books. The Pagoda World
books were sent via media mail. Media mail would have been faster though more costly for the magazines. It's generally no more than 7-10 days from any two points in the USA, and that's a maximum. I've had plenty of the Pagoda Books sent out from here and received in points distant in 2-3 days, as if it were first class or priority mail.
We believe the international ones were sent out via some third party mail service; we do know that ones in the past were sent via a company called Kaab
https://kaabnl.nl. We cannot tell you if Kaab handled all or only part of the international shipments.
The astute among you will note the word "reportedly" and "we believe"; in reality when we had the shipping issues, we
should have been able to get to the bottom of this. However, the printer who handled this was, shall we say, less than cooperative in working with us to find a solution. We had the same problem a year ago with PW #30; six months ago with #31. In both cases we went through a costly reprint and a remailing of duplicate issues. We were not about to do that a third time. The last straw, as it were, was when they told us that they send out tens of thousands of magazines monthly and we are their ONLY client complaining about magazines not arriving. They then went as far as suggesting that you, our members, were lying to us in order to get "free" additional copies. That was it, they closed the door on future business with us.
It's mentioned in the another thread, but we've changed printers, and along with that, mail class. The domestic, USA issues will go out presorted standard mail instead of bulk rate, and international ones will go out first class. They are also dropped in a completely different manner in a different state, and no 3rd party remailing services will be used.
It's taken a bit of work on the part of editor JonnyB and myself to sort this out over the past six months, but we believe by changing
everything in the process, the results must be different. We know the quality will be the same.