Today, for the second time in less than a week, I received a book that was either canceled by PBS or marked lost in the mail. The first was cancelled due to lack of response from the sender on December 29, 2022, then mailed 13 days after that. (I can tell when it was sent because it had a postage label purchased at the post office.) I did not mark it received because it had been cancelled and there had been no communication from the sender to me.

The second book was marked lost in the mail back in September. If it had an August or September postmark, I would mark it received (stuff gets lost on occasion). However, this book also has a mailing label from the post office on it--with a date of January 17, 2023.

These books were not sent by the same person, nor could they have used the same post office. (The first book was from Texas, the second from Missouri.) Both books requests had been passed on to the next person in line, and both books were sent to me and marked received as soon as I got them.

What should I do about this? I don't want to mark these books received and give the senders credit because they were sent so late, and there was no communication from either about books being sent late, or about the packages being returned to them by the post office.

Use the 'contact us' button and see what TPTB advise.

Copied from the rules of the site:

• • If a book was mailed more than 2 weeks late without notice to you about late mailing before it was mailed and
  • was already declared Lost at PBS before it arrives, and
  • you re-requested the book after it was declared "lost in the mail"  and
  • you end up with 2 copies, THEN
  • you do not have to mark the late-mailed-without-notice copy received.
    • Note: the late mailing must be confirmed- either the sender has told you this or the postmark on the package confirms it.  Sometimes Media Mail takes a long time, so a late-arriving book cannot be presumed to have been mailed late.
  • The rules governing late-mailing are:
    • If a sender wants to mail a book that has been declared Lost at PBS already she needs to contact you with a Personal Message asking you to confirm that you still want the book from her, and
    • You would need to have confirmed that you still wanted her copy of the book in a Personal Message in reply to hers before she mailed it.
  • The bottom line: If a sender sends a book late without getting confirmation from you that you have not gotten or requested another copy in the meantime, and you end up with two copies of the book, the sender has made the mistake here.  In this case (and ONLY in this case) you are not obligated to mark the lost book received (nor are you obligated to return the extra copy). 
  • You should also contact us to let us know about the extreme late mailing, so that this can be noted on the sender's account.

For the one that is months late, I suspect they just want to get the book out of their house and into the hands of someone who wants it. I wouldn't worry about it. For the more recent one, I'd send them a note to let them know what happened and why you aren't giving them a credit.

What Sarah said and copy the rules Wendy shared and send that in the PM also.