This is a letter about some troubles we've seen these past eight months.

They're the troubles we've had getting enough copies of TIME printed fast in a city where there was no paper and where practically all the presses were either sabotaged by the Japs or destroyed by our own bombers.

Maybe you'll remember that we started to print TIME in Manila almost the same day General MacArthur marched in (a Jap sniper was still banging away only fifty yards from the bindery). And soon now we will be turning out twenty times as many copies as we could print that first day.

For we have shipped a complete TIME printing plant 7,165 miles across the Pacific (cameras, folders, stitchers, offset presses and hundreds of other big & little items). And at last, its wheels are turning.

Fact is, we bought all this fine printing equipment way back in September 1944, in anticipation of just the chaos that our troops found in Manila--had it all boxed and ready to go. But for all this planning ahead, our Manila staff still had plenty of trials and tribulations.

First, there was hardly a business building in Manila that wasn't a wreck. The best the Army could assign us was a three-story warehouse whose roof had been burned away and whose floors had been gutted. (It took two months and some wonderful help from the Army to get a roof that would at least keep the rain off the presses.)

Second, there was the problem of 450 miserable Filipino men, women and children who had moved into our building bag & baggage. ("Day after day the garbage accumulated outside the doors and windows, and at mealtimes the office was so filled with smoke you couldn't see across it.") We hadn't the heart to throw them out on the street, so we bought most of them off for ten pesos. Then we tried turning off the water, but "the plumber had hardly left when our resourceful guests hack-sawed through the main." (At last report TIME-in-Manila still housed some fifty Filipinos. One is a one-legged tailor who has established his shop right inside the front door; another is an elderly gentleman whose sole possessions seem to be twelve 300-pound anchors.)

Then there was the question of paper: our first consignment from stateside--40 tons--was mysteriously shunted from the sidewalk in front of the printers to Bilibid Prison and then to a windowless warehouse near the Pasig River. When we finally got most of it back our Manila staff took turns guarding it day and night; it was worth $75,000 on the black market.

Somehow or other 108 of our 409 cases of printing equipment were offloaded by mistake on Cebu, 350 miles from Manila . . . two cases which showed up in our shipment turned out to contain typewriters . . . one press arrived so badly damaged it will be a total casualty for at least four months . . . and late in September we had to round up a whole new crew of printers when a polio outbreak quarantined all our plate-makers and pressmen.

All of this has given Manila Production Chief Bob Mattoch and Far Eastern Manager Bernard Clayton plenty of new grey hairs--but in spite of everything they managed to run off 10,000 copies of our Oct. 1 issue in our own plant (total print order: 35,000) and 16,000 copies of Oct. 8. The schedule calls for 70,000 Manila-printed copies next week and steady increases to 100,000--so the 550,000 U.S. troops still in the Philippines can get their copies while that same issue is still on the newsstands at home.

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