BOOK BURYING

In the past several months you have received considerable flak from your readers about where and how you bury the Sunday Book Review section (Calendar Letters). You have either ignored these complaints or treated them as a joke. Please be advised that I do not wish this complaint to be either ignored or treated as a joke.

I am one of your subscribers who is on what your Circulation Department euphemistically calls “split delivery,” which actually means that I live in a “high-crime neighborhood.”

Can you see the problem it presents us with? Sometimes Book Review is delivered upside down in the middle of Calendar on Saturday. Other times it is buried in Opinion on Sunday. If it doesn’t arrive on Saturday, how do we know it wasn’t overlooked?

If we call to inquire, the call is logged as a complaint against the agent, even though no complaint was intended. This is unfair, for our agent, at least, runs a very efficient operation.

I do not care, personally, where you hide Book Review or whether it is delivered on Saturday or on Sunday--as long as you are consistent! Is consistency too much for a subscriber to ask or expect of you?

PATRICIA J. SMITH

Santa Monica

Less than 6% of The Times’ Sunday circulation is on “split-delivery,” which is the delivery of Sunday Calendar, the comics, Home magazine, TV Times and the color inserts on Saturday to foil bad guys who tend to help themselves to those sections on Sundays. A toll-free call to a Times Service Center can provide a answer to the weekly whereabouts of Book Review, which is found elsewhere in The Times this week.