I think you may be pleased (and perhaps as surprised as I was) to learn that TIME will enter the New Year with a total circulation for all of its 13 editions of over 1 1/2 million.

And during 1944 we will actually be printing these 1 1/2 million copies each week on far less paper than we were using in the fall of 1942--which probably just goes to show that you never know what you can do until you have to do it.

One big reason for this latest half million increase is the tremendous demand for TIME that has developed among our servicemen overseas.

General MacArthur recently said "News is as necessary to the combat soldier as bread and bullets"--and today millions of young Americans in uniform are getting the newsmagazine habit and reading TIME cover-to-cover each week--to learn the news from home and to see how the fighting is going with their friends on other battlefronts all around the world.

In fact, our armed forces overseas are now getting far more copies of TIME and of LIFE than of any other magazine.

To deliver TIME while its news is still fresh we are printing one edition in Australia for General MacArthur's men and another edition in Honolulu for our soldiers and sailors in the Central Pacific. (Three hundred copies were flown into the Gilberts on schedule the Monday after the battle on Tarawa.) There is another edition in Iran--and in addition something like a quarter of a million copies of TIME's less-than-an-ounce "Pony" are being rushed from this country to our troops on other fronts all over the world.

Here at home, though we made a drastic cut by stopping all trial subscription offers and though we are still unable to supply enough copies to meet the newsstand demand, the circulation of TIME's regular domestic edition has forced itself back up to about the same 1,193,011 peak it hit just before paper curtailment--with roughly 800,000 subscribers and 400,000 newsstand buyers. And another 38,000 copies of our wartime classroom edition go to the nation's schools to be used as their textbook in current affairs.

North of the border the circulation of our Canadian Edition has grown to around 50,000, and south of the border the circulation of our Air Express Edition--printed partly in this country, partly in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and soon Brazil--has climbed to around 40,000, including the Presidents of Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Colombia and the Dominican Republic and something over 83% of all the U.S. citizens living in Central and South America.

For the rest of the world, we have our Overseas Edition, which goes by boat and plane to English-reading people in some 70 free countries; there is one reader on St. Helena who sometimes gets a whole year's copies at once; and one each in the Canary, Falkland, Fanning and Society Islands. There are two civilian subscribers in Greenland, two in Bechuanaland, three in the Soviet Union.

All this adds up to more than 1 1/2 million copies of TIME each week, and within the next month I hope I can bring you news of two more editions of TIME--one of them right under Adolf Hitler's nose!

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