A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

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

The only way you can tell whether the copy of TIME you are now reading was printed in Chicago or in Philadelphia is to look at the list of Assistant Editors over there at the left.

If there is a period after their names, the copy was printed in Chicago--if there isn't, it was printed in Philadelphia.

We first began printing TIME in two plants 660 miles apart just before the war began--when it became so important to get TIME's news to you fast. This would be a fairly simple job if TIME printed love stories instead of news--for then we would have time to set all the type in plant No. 1 and just send press plates to plant No. 2. (In fact, several unhurried magazines are printing separate eastern and midwestern editions right now just to save money on distribution.)

But every second counts in the TIME schedule--every minute lost means 920 copies lagging behind schedule--and we had to find some way to set identical type simultaneously in two widely separated composing rooms. We solved the problem with a marvelous gadget called a Teletypesetter. This enables a man at a glorified electric typewriter right in our editorial offices to set type about 60 words a minute on robot linotype machines he has never seen--one 83 miles away in Philadelphia, the other 715 miles away in Chicago.

As he ticks off the words, a typewritten copy comes off the machine here in New York. At the other end of the lines the printers get typewritten copies too--but they also get a narrow punched tape that they feed into an attachment that controls the typesetting keys in almost exactly the same way that a pianola record controls the keys of a piano. It sounds simple--but the Teletypesetter Company tells me no one has ever counted the number of parts in each sending machine--and that the reproducing attachments are equally complicated.

We have five sending machines in New York, three direct wires to each printer, eight linotypes equipped to handle the tapes. There are only 100 other Teletypesetters in all the world --and only two other publications use them over any comparable distance--the Edinburgh Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald, which print their London telegraph news from tape produced in London.

Of course, no matter how carefully we count the words in our stories, some fail to fit the columns of the magazine when they are cast in actual metal. And so, sandwiched in between the stories, the Teletype-setters flash instructions for changes in copy, usually in a sort of verbal gibberish: For example, on page 36 of this issue:

CORRX GAL. 9 WB Life on Guada CRN CORRX 1: Para--The following were no casualites.

CRN CORRX 1: Para--Simultaneous Another raider group swept through

Another stream of gibberish starts streaming over the wires just before deadline, after the editors have taken a last look at the bulletins and cables to make sure all TIME'S stories are up to the minute with Tuesday's front page news.

The Teletypesetter is only one of the wonderful new American inventions without which it would be impossible to print 1,200,000 copies of TIME in two far-apart plants in 24 hours--far faster than any other magazine on earth. If you are interested, I'll try to tell you about more of them in one of my future letters.

Cordially,

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