Next week there will be a different Signature to this letter.

Jim Linen, whom I have known for many years and who is no stranger to TIME, takes over my duties as Publisher and I take on a new job in the management of TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE.

Jim is just back in the U.S. after thirty months with the Office of War Information in charge of Mediterranean operations.

Born 33 years ago in Scranton, Pa., he went to Hotchkiss where he edited the school paper, and then on to Williams from which he graduated in 1934. Summers he filled in by working as a deckhand on a Grace Line freighter, by police reporting for the Scranton Tribune (to help pay his way through college), by taking a course in International Law at the League of Nations at Geneva on a history scholarship.

Right after graduation in 1934, Linen got married and came to work for TIME. He served a six-months' advertising apprenticeship in New York, was then transferred to TIME'S Detroit office. In 1938 he returned to New York for LIFE, and two years later became LIFE'S advertising manager. In this job he helped direct LIFE'S phenomenal growth during 1939, 1940 and 1941 -- and from it O.W.I.'s Robert Sherwood kidnapped him in 1942 to help set up O.W.I.'s offices around the world.

After a year in New York and Washington, Linen was sent overseas to inspect and coordinate O.W.I.'s outposts in the Eastern Mediterranean and India. For eight months he shuttled around among Algiers, Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul, and New Delhi -- then came home for a brief stint in O.W.I.'s Washington headquarters.

His final wartime assignment was to head up OWI in Italy and the Balkans. (While in Rome he published OWI magazines totaling 525,000 copies a month -- among them the Italian "Nuovo Mundo," the Croatian "DANAS," the Serbian "AAHAC.")

Next week James Linen, back home in Greenwich, Connecticut with his wife and four children, takes on his biggest publishing job yet. I know you join with all of us in wishing him well.

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