To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news

I have just been reading a lot of letters from TIME subscribers in England about how excited they were when our July 6th issue with Old Glory on the cover reached them on the Fourth of July.

One of them cabled us, he was so pleased--another (Author Osbert Sitwell) predicted that before long TIME will be speeded up so fast that it will "come out before the events it describes." And all in all these letters were so enthusiastic that I thought you might like to hear something more about how TIME has been flying across the Atlantic each week to an extraordinarily interesting group of men and women in the British Isles.

Among them are the Duke of Kent and Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands --Lord Beaverbrook, Publisher of the Daily Express, and Sir Walter Citrine, head of the British Trades Union Council--H. G. Wells, Noel Coward, Brendan Bracken, Lady Astor and many other people high in the official, industrial and intellectual life of the Empire.

For example, TIME flies each week to the Library of the House of Lords as a gift of Liberal Lord Wedgwood and to the studio of the famous sculptor Augustus John. Labor economist Harold Laski receives a copy-- so does Lord McGowan, Director of the Imperial Chemical Industry. Another goes to No. 10 Downing Street for Winston Churchill--and still another carries the address of a very high personage who must go unnamed.

Of course cargo space in the Atlantic Clippers is at such a tremendous premium that our allotment is for only 200 pounds once a week--and so we cannot send nearly enough copies to satisfy the demand. But we print a special lithographed edition on flyweight paper in a third plant just outside New York City (our two main plants are in Chicago and Philadelphia)--and we leave out most of the ads and use special light-weight binding staples--and one way or another we get the weight down to one-third as much as a regular copy of TIME, and manage to send 1,300 copies across the Atlantic in each of our weekly shipments.

This service to the United Kingdom is only three months old now--but, as most of you know, TIME has been flying an Air Express Edition of about 30,000 copies a week to Latin America ever since last year. Here too the roll of TIME'S subscribers is a most distinguished one--including the presidents of six of our sister republics and a long list of important English-reading people from the Rio Grande to the Strait of Magellan. For example, the Consul General of Peru looked through the names of our subscribers in his country and was "very much impressed with the high representation in cultural and intellectual circles as well as the large amount of big business concerns and banking institutions" appearing there.

In addition we are sending as many copies of TIME as we can squeeze aboard the planes for our troops in Iceland, Australia, Africa and India. The Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru will get TIME next week in his prison at Poona --and TIME goes by air to Madame Chiang Kai-shek all the way across the world in Chungking.

Of course we have been losing money on our Air Express copies ever since we put the first shipment on a Pan American airliner for South America 16 months ago--and TIME-by-Air will probably stay a commercial liability until well after the war.

But meanwhile, we like to think that our pioneer plane edition is helping to tighten the bonds of understanding among the United Nations--and thus hastening the day when democratic journalism can fly wherever alert, intelligent people want it.

Cordially,

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