A Letter From The Publisher: Feb. 24, 1967

“We call it the United States. And we’re bound together by our Constitution and our language. Yet, in many ways, we’re a group of separate kingdoms. Our land grows palm trees and pine, redwoods and beach plum, vanishing Key deer and whooping cranes. Our people say ‘you all’ and ‘youse’; catch shrimp and sell stocks; live in lean-tos, skyscrapers and stucco bungalows. There’s never been such a fiercely diverse land.”

So say the editors of TIME-LIFE Books in introducing a new series devoted to summarizing and displaying this diversity. The opening volume in the TIME-LIFE Library of America, out this week, is The Pacific States, covering California, Oregon and Washington. The author is Neil Morgan, a Californian who in 1963 published Westward Tilt, a much-acclaimed study of the region. TIME-LIFE’S The Pacific States contains maps, travel and nature information, museum listings. Above all, it contains an account of “the restless edge of American society”—an edge that we at TIME have often explored. In his preface, Poet-Critic Kenneth Rexroth writes: “The inhabitants of the Pacific Coast are in the front rank of a world revolution that will make a far greater difference in human life than either the French or the Russian revolutions, or both of them together.”

The Library of America will total twelve volumes and cover all 50 states, region by region (further information is available from TIME-LIFE Books, Time & Life Building, Chicago, Ill. 60611). Consulting editor for the series is Pulitzer Prize winner Oscar Handlin, Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard. The second volume, The Heartland, written by TIME Associate Editor Robert McLaughlin, covers Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. It will be published in March, and Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, for one, is already excited about it.

He writes: “This book will stimulate an awareness that the Heartland’s history is neither dull nor dead, but an exciting tribute to the people of the region—a people who are a little less than the angels, but always trying to do better.”

THREE times a week, a four-minute news program called View from the 33rd Floor is heard in 40 countries throughout the world. The 33rd floor is in Manhattan’s Time & Life Building, where Jim Alberse prepares and tapes the broadcasts.

An English professor at Fordham University before he came to TIME-LIFE International two decades ago, Alberse draws on the current issues of TIME for much of his material. A nominal charge is made for the service to commercial radio stations. It is free to the 265 college stations that use it, and to the 295 outlets of the Armed Forces Radio abroad.

Another program run by Alberse and distributed on much the same basis is With Me Today, a 15-minute, biweekly interview with newsmakers and news reporters. Visiting Time Inc. correspondents regularly turn up to discuss issues and events. Outside guests have ranged from Poet Paul Engle to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge to Restaurateur Howard Johnson. Says Alberse: “The programs are as varied as TIME itself—and often as unpredictable.”