BOOKS IN "M" BAGS

One of the pleasures of retirement for readers is the added time to read that we now have. And in the US, an old school classmate, Cheryl Gawronski, told us about a wonderful invention called an "M" bag, with which you can ship books anywhere in the world for a dollar a pound. We take advantage of it at least once everytime we are in the states.
Yesterday our M bag of books FINALLY came in! Although we are expecting another much smaller M bag from our California trip (the San Francisco bookstores are fabulous!), this should be the end of the big book loads (I know I keep saying this) and it's a good thing because it was such a huge hassle. I say the end because we went through all of our boxes of books in our storage area and threw a bunch out and had sent over what we wanted/needed.
We sent it about three months ago, in the middle of July, right around the time my mother died. It should take no more than 10 weeks, but I think that is just the US side. So about three weeks ago we get a letter from the Post Office in Milan. They want to know about our business and where the list of products is and invoices, etc. We call and explain in our broken Italian that we are NOT a business, that some of the books are old or gifts, that we are retired etc., and they say fine, just write a letter explaining it. So we do. And start to wait. And wait! I even had nightmares about the bag not arriving.
Now the postal rules in the states do not apply to Italy-that is one of the first lessons we learned here. They don't HAVE to deliver a huge bag of books for which we paid $50+ in the states to send. They also do very little reading here, so this whole thing is unusual. But anyway, they needed to collect some kind of import tax on this package, so they nailed us with another 17 euros. We cannot fathom where that figure came from-maybe a tip for everyone who had to handle this bag?
Part of the US regulations are that you need to package and label separately the books in parcels. When the M bag arrived, they had unwrapped each and every package and maybe even helped themselves to some, who knows? That is pretty normal around here. Anyway, the books were all bent and soiled and I cannot help but think that they had checked out our claims by looking at publishing years, etc.
We're just happy to have our books. And now we are having bigger, better book shelves built to store them.