To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

How do you address an archduke?

How many U.S. troops were in Europe on Christmas Day 1917?

Which way does a Sikh wind his turban?

How many pounds of meat have been Lend-Leased?

Where are most U.S. hops grown?

How many rupees a month does an American soldier in India get?

How many square miles of U.S. territory are now in enemy hands?

How much did American investors lose on defaulted foreign bonds from 1919 to 1929?

How does the infant mortality rate in Quebec compare with that in Bombay?

What is the gestation period of a cow?

These ten questions are not a guessing game for subscribers or even an intelligence test. They are just a sample of the 1,300 questions a week that have to be answered for the editors of TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE.

One of the biggest advantages TIME writers have over other reporters is the trained researcher each of them has at his elbow--ready to dig out the added facts he needs to write confidently and to make his story tight and precise, without fudging points where his memory is vague. But our researchers would often be at their wits' end for answers without the model reference library we have been building up for them over the past twenty years.

When TIME began in 1923 the library contained just three books--the Bible, Xenophon's Anabasis, and the Iliad. The index was a set of scrapbooks into which a red-headed office boy pasted TIME's news stories. And the "morgue" was simply a batch of clippings the editor carried in his pocket when he went to the printers each week to correct the final proofs.

The three books which formed TIME's original library have grown to more than 20,000--and heaven knows how many millions of newspaper clippings, magazine articles and TIME research reports are now filed away in 300,000 folders in the morgue. Once we weighed a filing cabinet with and without its contents and deduced that we have in all some 23,280 pounds of news-facts stored away, including 250,000 biographical folders to help our editors tell the news in terms of the people who make it.

Every four weeks some 15,000 new items are added and 10,000 out-of-date ones are thrown away to keep the walls of the TIME & LIFE Building from bursting. To save space we keep newspapers on microfilm--800 pages on a roll the size of a sardine tin.

Running TIME's reference library keeps 33 librarians and helpers busy full time under tall Smith-alumna Virginia Smucker, who worked for two college libraries before she came to TIME six years ago. Her staff never ceases to wonder at the amazing questions thrown at them day after day--but day after day they take all comers in their stride. And so if you sometimes feel that the background facts in TIME's stories are especially sharp and clear, I think you ought to know that these people (whose names never show up in type) should get a lot of the credit.

Cordially,

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