A Letter From The Publisher, Jan. 7, 1946

If every man, woman and child in a city the size of Wilmington, Delaware, moved to a new address in the next twelve weeks and asked us to record the change on our books, it would approximate what has just happened to TIME.

During the last three months we have received 180,000 requests from subscribers to change the addresses to which we have been sending TIME, or to stop their copies altogether until they knew where they would be. Nothing like it has ever happened to TIME before. It is, for instance, twice as many changes as we had to handle only two years ago. And it means a change for one of every seven TIME subscribers.

A great many of them, of course, are for homecoming servicemen, and these are changes that we are especially happy to make. Every day last fall 2,000 to 3,000 A.P.O. and F.P.O. addresses wrote us to send TIME to them at home, or to hold up their copies until they knew where they were going. Even now, our “suspend until informed” file has about 95,000 names (mostly subscribers to our military editions) in it.

Things have gone better than they might have because we reorganized our military subscribers’ files. Early in the war it became apparent that our system of indexing civilian subscriptions would not do for the wandering U.S. Army & Navy. Like most national publishers, TIME had only one way of listing subscribers: geographically. No change could be made, therefore, without first looking up the subscriber’s old address in the geographical file. But the armed forces, for reasons of military security, refused to let servicemen give their new addresses until they had arrived at them. When they did, and could tell us about it, they generally—and quite naturally—neglected to mention their old address.

So our harassed Subscription Department took on the huge job of setting up and maintaining an alphabetical, as well as a geographical file for our military subscribers. That way, presumably, we could find their addresses whether they were on duty in this country or overseas, en route, or back home.

But even now, with two files, we have complications. For example: our military files are loaded with 4,800 Smiths, 3,200 Johnsons, 1,800 Joneses, 180 Goldbergs, 22 MacArthurs, and 23 Halseys (ten of them in the Navy). Furthermore, there are 246 Robert Smiths, 108 William Johnsons, 83 Charles Browns, 66 John Joneses, and 21 Robert E. Lees.

The Navy has special problems of its own. During the last three months naval subscribers have sent us change-of-address notifications naming 585 ships being transferred from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The names of all TIME subscribers were looked up and changed over. And when a Navy task force came to the East Coast to celebrate Navy Day, a small blizzard of address changes hit our offices from this one operation alone.

Today, 20 weeks after V-J Day, TIME still has about 400,000 armed forces subscribers (more than TIME’S entire subscriber circulation ten years ago), alphabetically present and pretty well accounted for. We are sure that almost all of them are getting their copies on time. But Subscription is still out of breath. Changes-of-address are only part of its work. TIME, for instance, has just had an unprecedented rush of Christmas gift subscriptions, and this year the greater part of them came in later than ever before. Most of them will be filled; some, obviously, will be a little late. But we are catching up fast on our backlog of subscription correspondence, and we hope that you subscribers at home whose change of addresses or renewal instructions have somehow been sidetracked or delayed will continue to be as understanding as you have been up to now.