A Letter from the Publisher

EACH week as TIME'S press run begins in Chicago, one of the first copies off the press is sealed in an envelope marked "Not for Release" and rushed special delivery to nearby Glencoe, Ill. By Tuesday noon, a day before TIME appears on most newsstands, Mrs. Gerald F. Miner, a 52-year-old grandmother, has begun leafing through her copy. Then a second and more specialized TIME press run begins. The sound, instead of the roar of rotary presses, is the soft plunk of a six-key braille typewriter. Mrs. Miner is laboriously pecking out TIME'S cover story (25 minutes for a braille page) on sheets of thin white cardboard.

By Friday Mrs. Miner has sandwiched 15 hours of typing time among the chores of a housewife. She stuffs the 26-to 30-page completed cover story into a Manila envelope, drops it in the mail. By Saturday, Richard Kinney, deaf-blind instructor at Winnetka's Hadley School for the Blind, has begun to run his fingers across one of the few up-to-date news stories available to him (most braille transcribing lags weeks behind publication dates, and for the deaf-blind, for whom radio is useless, news almost always grows stale before it is read). Kinney, who never heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls before he read TIME'S April 15 cover story, starts the fragile sheets on a postal round robin of some 60 Hadley School correspondence students. The chain breaks only when the tiny raised dots are worn off the paper.

Mrs. Miner learned to braille last year, spent some 200 hours practicing before she began transcribing. She chose TIME to copy because she likes it, and thought blind readers would appreciate its flavor and news coverage. This week's cover story on Canada's Prime Minister John Diefenbaker will be her 23rd. She began copying with the Martin Luther King story (Feb. 18), missed the Birdie Tebbetts cover (July 8) because she and her husband (who is president of a Chicago paper company) were on vacation. Many of her blind readers are avid baseball fans, and she plans to catch up on Tebbetts.

The gratitude that Mrs. Miner's blind readers have for her weekly press run has been well expressed by Reader Kinney. "You can readily understand how much color and background TIME cover stories add to the news bulletins that blind people receive by radio," he says. "Imagine, then, what worlds of art, thought and politics these wide-ranging articles open up to those of us who are both blind and deaf!"

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