A Letter From The Publisher, Jun. 25, 1945

A good many of your questions about TIME are still unanswered —although this is the 160th letter I have written you since June, 1942.

“I’ve searched the files of the Berkeley Public Library, but I can’t find a line about Cover Artist Boris Chaliapin,” writes a woman in California. “Is he related to the late great Metropolitan basso?”

“My special interest in TIME is the way you have been adding to the American vocabulary through the years” writes a Vermont man. “Won’t you make this the subject of a letter some time?”

“It’s been fun to read about your far-flung correspondents and your globe-girdling editors and the girls who dot every word in TIME/’ says a man in Washington. “But the member of your staff who interests me most is Circulation Director F. D. Pratt, the guy who sends me those letters when my subscription is about to expire. I suspect he’s led a fascinating and probably misspent life, and I wish you’d tell us about him.”

I hope to answer all these questions some week soon—but this week I’d like to answer a question some of you have asked about the Publisher’s Letter itself—and why it appears each week in this space in TIME.

Perhaps the best explanation would be to go back to the days when TIME began. “If TIME is to succeed,” its young editors reasoned, “we must make it something more than a magazine. For the service TIME offers is highly personal—and we must establish among our readers a unique understanding of what we are trying to do for them, so they will feel a special confidence in TIME.”

And sure enough, we soon found that perhaps the most remarkable thing about TIME was this: people who liked TIME (and not all our readers did —or do) liked it so much they wanted to know more about it—more about the way we gathered the news for them and checked it for accuracy, more about the people who wrote it and how much they knew and what they stood for—even about how TIME was printed and how we got their copies to them so fast.

In the early days when we had only a few editors and only a handful of correspondents and only one printer, there wasn’t much to tell you about TIME that could not wait until we could say-it in our letter the next time we wrote you about your subscription.

But year by year as the news grew bigger and more personally important to us all, TIME had to expand its service again and again to cover your ever-widening news-horizons. And by 1942 there seemed to be so many new things happening week after week at TIME—things that might make TIME more interesting and more valuable to you if you knew about them promptly—that we began looking around for some way of getting this information to you as quickly as your copies of TIME.

And that explains why we started this Letter from the Publisher: to take you “backstage” at TIME regularly once each week, to show you just what we were trying to do and how we were trying to do it—and to take you into our confidence about our plans for the future.

Cordially,

P.S. If there is some TIME question which particularly interests you (whether about our newsmen at the battlefronts or our researchers in New York or the TIME-editions we print each week all around the world) I’d appreciate your writing me about it.