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

"Fie on TIME for libeling a lady and making a killer of her. Dangerous Dan McGrew was pumped full of lead by the man from the creeks. . . ."

"In your splendid article on penicillin you neglected to mention the grandmothers who used that remedy constantly in the early days. . . ."

"TiME says General Alexander ran a mile in 3 minutes 38 seconds. This is 24 seconds better than the record. The timekeepers must have kissed the Blarney stone. . . ."

Every day of the week but one, scores of letters pour in to the editors of TIME. They come from Sauk City and Seattle and Syracuse, from islands in the Pacific and towns just south of the Arctic Circle. They ask questions, make suggestions, correct errors, give added facts about the news subscribers read in TIME.

Who writes these thousands of letters? Very few habitual "writers-to-the-editor," for one thing. (TIME'S staff is constantly surprised at the number of letters that begin, "This is the first time I have written to any magazine.") Most of them come from subscribers of long standing who happen to have an intimate, detailed, close-up knowledge of some news-subject recently covered in TIME.

Some of these letter-writers are people you've never heard of -- miners in Alaska, schoolteachers in Ohio, missionaries in the jungles of Africa.

But many others are names every body knows -- so many, in fact, that a list of them since 1924 reads almost like a roll-call of the great and near-great of our times : Admiral (then Captain) Ernest J. King and William Ran dolph Hearst ("I think the less said about my college career the better"), Irene Castle and Adolphe Menjou ("I have never up to the present been a waiter in real life"), H. G. Wells and Billy Rose ("I would rather be labeled 'dwarfish' than not be mentioned in your splendid magazine at all") -- Bernard Baruch and Franklin Roosevelt, Walter Winchell, Rudy Vallee, Robert L. Ripley, Harold Ickes, Bing Crosby, Walter Lippmann, Bob Hope, Henry Wallace, William Saroyan, Edgar Bergen, Admiral Nimitz, Ernie Pyle, Salvador Dali, Elmer Davis, Thomas Mann. . . .

Of the hundreds of letters we receive each month, scarcely 80 can make the jam-packed Letters column, and subscribers often ask us how these letters are chosen. I guess the best answer was written 20 years ago to introduce TIME'S first Letters column (Dec. 29, 1924): "Herewith excerpts from letters come to the desks of the editors during the past week. They are selected primarily for the information they contain, either supplementary to, or corrective of news published previously in TIME."

The purpose of TIME'S Letters department is the same today as it was in 1924: to bring you extra items of interest about the news you read in TIME, and to set you straight on the news when TIME (as all magazines must) occasionally misses the ball. (There are probably more facts in TIME per hundred words than in any other magazine -- and as one subscriber once observed, "Nobody can go to bat as often as TIME does and bat 1000%.")

Letters to TIME are a barometer we watch closely, for as long as subscribers (great and small) snap back at TIME the way they do, we can be sure they are reading and thinking and discussing practically everything TIME is saying.

Cordially,

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