Did you ever see a V-Mail magazine?

Perhaps you never will--unless and until some Navy man you know comes home from a coral atoll in the South Seas or a far-away base in Iceland with a dog-eared copy of V-Mail TIME tucked into his kitbag.

Right now there are isolated, vital outposts of the Navy all around the world -- in Iceland, in the Mediterranean, in the Caribbean, in the Aleutians, and scattered all through the Pacific -- outposts where there are no printing presses within miles --where TIME-by-V-Mail is still being read each week at the same time you are reading the same issue here at home.

TIME'S V-Mail Edition started at Munda in the Solomon Islands just a week or so after the Americans landed there in their first move northward from Guadalcanal -- and most of the people here at TIME still think of it as the "Munda Edition," forgetting that there are now many other places in both oceans where similar editions are printed.

Next to letters from home, TIME has top priority at the Navy outposts that print V-Mail (from rolls of film rushed in by plane). Only about half a dozen copies can be run off at some posts, however, and a thousand or more sailors may have to share them. Consequently, they are often read aloud from cover to cover at some assembly.

But Navy officials in Washington tell us that at many bases the officers and men are too eager for the news to wait for TIME to be read to them. They queue up and read it a page at a time as it comes off the V-Mail printing machines! page" to that size the type would be only a third as big as this--so small that even a Navy man with 20/20 eyesight would have trouble reading it. Consequently we have to cut up proofs of all our columns of type and pictures and maps and paste them together again in two-column pages instead of three. Each page of the V-Mail Edition contains about half as many words as a regular TIME page, so each copy runs between 60 and 70 pages of thick photographic paper printed on one side only. The result is the bulkiest of all our 20 editions -- as thick--as a ham sandwich.

Once in a great while this clip-and-paste system slips a cog. For example, there was the week a Medicine story on dipsomaniacs got mixed up with a Science story on fish. Our sailors overseas must have gotten quite a kick out of reading about drunken smelts. ("The mysterious malady that all but wiped out the Great Lakes smelts is exceedingly dubious in the case of pathological liars, drunks, dope addicts or morons. But a few hardy ones survive")

Cordially,

P. S. I wonder how many of TIME'S 20 editions you remember. Seven of them, with 424,727 circulation, are printed just for our armed forces overseas and are their No. 1 source of news these days. You'll find the whole list below.*

* Here are the 20 editions of TIME, printed on every continent except Antarctica. TIME U. S. (four printings) Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Classroom; TIME Canadian; TIME Air Express for Latin America (five printings); Export, Mexico City, Bogota, Buenas Aires, S`ao Paulo; TIME Overseas (three printings); Export Honolulu, Stockholm; TIME for the Armed Forces (seven printings); Pony, Pacific Pony, VMail, Sydney, Calcutta, Teheran, Cairo.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.