On a recent Tuesday morning a phone rang in one of TIME'S Manhattan offices. It was a call from the Circulation Department asking for a job to be done in a hurry. The job was a letter, which had to be printed and in the mail within three days. Could it be done? The answer was yes. Two days later, 160,000 finished letters were on their way and two handy little machines were folding and inserting more letters into envelopes for mailing at the rate of 4,000 an hour.

The office that handled this particular job is a department in TIME Inc. called Central Printing. It handles an average of 3,000 printing jobs each year, which add up to a total of some 300 million pieces of printed matter. They range from special circulation and promotion letters and projects to annual reports, stationery and Christmas cards. The job of supervising this volume of internal printing calls for a good manager who also knows art, layout, type and paper.

The man in charge of the Central Printing Department is Amos Bethke, who heads a staff of seven. The majority of printing orders are farmed out to regular printers and letter-mailing houses. But every job that comes in seems to have its particular problem. There is, for example, a book listing 18,000 different prices for envelopes and letters alone.

As soon as a printing order comes in, one of the staff takes over, selects the paper, picks an engraver, chooses a printer and schedules the job. "The important thing," says Bethke, "is to fit the job to the equipment which can do it best and most economically. The kind of job and the equipment of various plants are controlling factors in who does the work."

Bethke began to learn about type at the age of eleven in Groton, S. Dak., when he got a job as printer's devil on the local paper, the Groton Independent. His tutor was Shop Foreman John Thoeny, who now owns the paper. Bethke worked before and after school and all day Saturday for a salary of $3 a week. He began to learn hand composition, then linotype, layout and makeup. After graduating from high school, he worked as editor of the paper for a year before going to Dakota Wesleyan University. During summers he toured the Midwest as an itinerant printer, ''working with the last of a famous breed, the oldtime tramp printers."

Bethke next took a job as advertising manager for a small paper in Tarpon Springs, Fla. When the Florida boom broke in 1926, he headed for New York with $50 in his pocket, got a linotyper's job on the New York Times the next day. For a year he saved money by living rent-free on the third floor of a Greenwich Village house occupied by a group of unemployed actors and an organization dedicated to the preservation of American Indians. In lieu of rent, Bethke played the piano for the society's weekly meetings. As he recalls, "it was always the same tune -- Onward, Christian Soldiers."

In a series of later production jobs in New York and Boston, Bethke worked for advertising offices of department stores, specifying type and doing layout. At night he went to school to study graphic arts and typography. It was in his Boston period that Bethke's type work caught the eye of Typographic Service Co. in New York, one of the largest suppliers of type service in the world. To an invitation to come down for an interview, Bethke replied that he would, but added: "I warn you I'll make no impression whatsoever on you." He got the job.

During the next nine years, before coming to TIME Inc., Bethke tried his hand at designing a new type ("It was a lovely idea, but didn't come off; it was ashcanned"). One of his special jobs for TIME: designing the type and layout for the News Quiz.

Printing is a fine craft, says Bethke. "You can use your head and hands and create something that satisfies your eye and your taste." At home Bethke gets further satisfaction from a 100-year-old flat bed hand press on which he has turned out, among other things, a specially designed and printed children's book.

Cordially yours,

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