A Letter From The Publisher, Sep. 27, 1954

After recently completing a vacation trip through Canada, I headed back to Canada again almost immediately. This time the trip was in line of duty. At Ste.-Adèle-en-haut, Que., we had scheduled a meeting of the people who work on TIME’S Canadian edition.

The meeting at Ste.-Adèle included editors, writers and researchers from New York, our resident Canadian advertising sales force, circulation and promotion people and TIME correspondents. In round-table groups and seminars we had a chance to examine our various jobs, review some history of TIME in Canada, and take a look at the future. I would like to pass along the highlights of just three of the areas we reviewed:

ONE was a report from our circulation department. Not many companies get a second chance to prove the soundness of their basic principles all over again. TIME had such a chance when we began the Canadian edition in 1943. In a different country we were able to test, 20 years after its inception, the whole newsmagazine idea and its appeal to an educated, English-reading people. In its first year the Canadian edition of TIME reached a circulation of 45,500. Five years later the figure had spiraled to 110,600. This year TIME’S circulation in Canada is 164,600—reaching one family in every 21 across the country.

The Canadian edition of TIME carries its own advertising, and our Canadian advertising sales manager, Bradley Gundy, who organized and ran the Ste.-Adèle meeting, reported on this side of the business: In our first year, TIME Canadian carried 196 pages of advertising. As the country’s economy expanded and more and more industry developed in Canada, advertising in general also expanded. By 1949 we had passed the thousand mark of advertising pages in the magazine. And last year saw an alltime high, when advertisers placed a total of 2,152 pages in our Canadian edition.

People read TIME to get the news of their day. And the span of TIME in Canada since 1943 has covered a burgeoning of industry, finance and population in the country. For Larry Laybourne, TIME’S chief of correspondents, this visit to Canada was like coming back home. In 1944 we had one news bureau, in Ottawa, and Laybourne ran it. Today we have bureaus not only in Ottawa, but also in Toronto and Montreal. In addition, we now have a network of 30 part-time correspondents, from the Yukon to Newfoundland, who help insure our getting the best possible coverage of the news.

Cordially yours,