A Letter From The Publisher, Jul. 29, 1946

Please tell me how I can get the copy of TIME that gave the name of the plastic surgeon that lifted the Duchess of Windsor’s face.

On a motor trip from Texas to Buenos Aires how much of the road is passable?

Could you please tell me where I can get a sundial?

Can animals think?

These requests for information are unfair examples of the hundreds you make to us every month. They arrive all shapes and sizes and in sufficient volume (about one-sixth of our editorial mail) to keep a large staff perpetually burrowing for the answers—many of which have nothing to do with stories that have appeared in TIME. It is an old TIME custom to answer every letter we receive, but once in a while somebody overestimates our capacity. Take this recent communication from a South Carolina schoolboy, for instance:

I am making a research report on Fascism, Naziism, Socialism, Communism, the Atlantic Charter, Lend Lease, League of Nations, Moscow Conference, UNRRA, International Monetary Fund, Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Dumbarton Oaks Conference and proposals, Pan American Union, Good Neighbor Policy, San Francisco Conference, the United Nations Organization and charter. . . . 7 would appreciate it if you would send me any information you have on these subjects.

Well, obviously, we have a morgueful of material on those subjects, but it would take a boxcar to deliver it to our hungry reader. The best we could do in his case was explain how to go about using the nearest public library.

But there are many genuine services that we, as a news organization, are especially equipped to perform, and our request-fulfillment batting average is pretty good. Recently, for example, we have suggested the clinic best fitted to handle a case of Hodgkin’s disease; supplied the addresses of public citizens who move around too fast for friends to keep in touch with them; forwarded a list of appraisers to a Netherlands reader with a collection of rare coins to sell (he hoped that the proceeds would provide an education for his children); offered what guidance we could to discharged veterans faced with the exciting prospect of a college education they could not have afforded before the war.

Some of you seem to regard us as a court of last resort for settling your wagers on every conceivable subject. We are even asked to lighten the load of parents beset with the one-track vagaries of small boydom. Wrote one of them to us recently, in some desperation: “I have a ten-year-old son who (collects) military insignia. . . . For the past six months our name has been a byword in Downers Grove (Ill.). People start suddenly and streak for home when they see any of us approaching. No one is safe from our friendly, but firm, tug on the sleeve and an insinuating voice saying, ‘That’s a nice patch you’re wearing; have you a spare you don’t need?’ And so it goes. . . . Would appreciate anything you gentlemen . . . can furnish Bobby and me.” We furnished Bobby and his father with whatever shoulder patches we could squeeze out of our returned war correspondents. ‘

It may seem silly to take the trouble to find out what the Zulu word for “home” is (we haven’t found it yet); what the late President Calvin Coolidge’s “cure” for seasickness was (if he had one); who “actually” was the first person to make ice cream (the evidence is inconclusive); how German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel had his flat feet fixed (he didn’t). But the temptation to try to find the correct answer is irresistible—and the result goes into TIME’S morgue for the future use, or edification, of TIME’S editors, writers, researchers, and of tomorrow’s letters-to-the-editor writers.

Cordially,

James A. Linen