AGE: 40.

GENERAL CONDITION : Healthy. As much muscle as ever, with quite a few refinements on how to use it. Still growing.

CIRCULATION : Flowing faster.

APPEARANCE : Changing gradually with the years. Showing more color.

STATE OF MIND: Searching, inquisitive, digging, critical, sometimes downright nosy, often troubled, occasionally angry, but more often amused or philosophical. Never satisfied.

This a bit of self-diagnosis after a fullface look in the mirror on this, our 40th birthday. The first issue of TIME appeared exactly 40 years ago this week--March 3, 1923. It was, if we may be permitted a bit of fond reminiscence, an entirely new, stylish, venturesome, 30-page publication, all black and white and full of beans. It went to 12.000 charter subscribers, including some names that are printed rather large in history: Thomas A. Edison, Henry Ford, William Howard Taft, William Allen White, Booth Tarkington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Some who were on the original list are still with us; a notable example is New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman.

And there are many others who have held on through most of those years. After we mentioned our anniversary in the February 22 issue, old and new subscribers began writing in to wish us happy birthday. Some have been sentimental, some tart and a few downright caustic. From Lincoln, Neb., Carl H. Steelquist wrote that he had gotten out his copy of Vol. I No. 1. with House Speaker Joe Cannon on the cover, and sat down to tell us "I have enjoyed TIME these 40 years and wish continued success for you." Then Albert Mallen of New York City whacked us about some errors we have had to admit, but softened the blow by ending with "Happy Birthday to You!" Isaac Michell wrote from Tel Aviv that he has been reading TIME since 1925, and offered "good wishes for the future of your/my weekly."

The original list of 12,000 subscribers has grown to a circulation of 3,600,000 around the world, to readers who get not only the U.S. edition but also eight international editions--in more than 150 countries. And while we're on the subject of statistics, let us say a word about money. TIME was started in 1923 on a painfully collected bankroll of $86,000. In 1962 the gross revenue of Time Inc. was $326 million.

At first Time Inc. meant just TIME. But the Inc. spread to FORTUNE, LIFE, ARCHITECTURAL FORUM, HOUSE & HOME, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, and now a diversity of other enterprises. The combined circulation of all Time Inc. publications around the world now exceeds 13 million. And TIME has been imitated at home and abroad.

TIME has changed a good deal through the years, but we have never undergone one of those shattering format shakeups that have ripped so many magazines. When radio and television and movies and nightclubs coalesced into one big forum of entertainment, we started our Show Business section; as leisure time and affluence increased in the developed countries of the world, we established a Modern Living section; as more businessmen began to spread their operations on an international scope, we started the World Business section. We have added more pictures inside and have introduced a variety of artistic styles on our cover. For our anniversary issue, it seems quite appropriate to us that we have a cover that looks to the future in space but makes a gentle bow to the past through Botticelli's Venus.

WE expect to continue changing as change seems indicated. On our 20th anniversary, the man who started all this, Henry R. Luce, told the staff at dinner: "To you I say, it is better to think of us as quite new--new every week--for indeed not a week goes by without important changes--changes in who we are, changes in what we have to do, changes in the world with which your work is done." On that same evening, he used a phrase that keeps ringing in our ears. He said that we have to be "everlastingly contemporary." That's what we try to be, and what we expect to be for the next 40 years.

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