For the first time in the memory of our oldest 'typesetters (short for teletypesetter operators) conditions in this critical department of TIME are normal. One 'typesetter even describes them as "monotonous." That may be the way it seems to him, but the wonder is that they can meet the weekly barrage of late copy and last minute corrections and still get us to press on time.

The truth is that until now our teletypesetter department has never been normal. It was set up shortly after World War II began as the only practical means of producing identical copies of TIME simultaneously in different printing plants (our print order had grown too big for one plant to handle) and to speed up our news operation by getting editorial copy into print faster. No one had tried to make the newly developed teletypesetter do what TIME required of it, and we might have made this transition more happily in ordinary times.

But the war brought in an era of draft calls, which depleted our 'typesetting staff, and of crisis journalism with its bad news breaks and late news. The late Adolf Hitler was forever making a major move on weekends. Pearl Harbor happened on Sunday and V-J Day was on a Tuesday. Inasmuch as our deadline is midnight Monday, interruptions like these meant that the 'typesetters, who are always the last to leave, shared with the rest of the editorial department the headaches of late closings.

Luckily, our teletypesetter machines were installed before the war stopped their manufacture, enabling us to print in Philadelphia and Chicago (and thus keep up with our rising circulation) and to hold the magazine open later for last minute news without disrupting our distribution schedules. Now, TIME'S domestic edition, which is the fastest magazine printing operation extant (well over 1,500,000 copies in 24 hours), is also printed in Los Angeles, 2,500 miles from our editorial offices.

The key machine in this unique operation is the teletypesetter perforator, which looks like a glorified electric typewriter. With it, by pressing the correct keys, a 'typesetter punches combinations of holes in a narrow paper tape. When completed, this tape contains not only the holes which correspond to all the words and punctuation in the story he has set but also holes which control the spacing so that every line will come out the right length. When this tape is fed into a transmitter it 1) makes correctly-spaced typewritten copy for our proofreaders and make-up men; 2) reproduces itself at the other end of wires in the Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Chicago printing plants. There the tape is fed into especially equipped Linotype machines, whose typesetting keys it controls in much the same way that a pianola roll controls the keys of a mechanical piano. The result is galleys of correctly-justified lines of metal type ready to be made up into pages according to make-up instructions from New York.

There are fewer than 500 teletypesetter perforators in the world, and none of them control such remote printings as TIME'S. TIME has seven machines and nine men to keep them operating. Most of them work a two-day, 20-hour week teletypesetting, and spend the rest of their time on allied production jobs. One has to put up at a nearby hotel on Tuesday to be on hand for late news breaks.

The fact that they can set copy twice as fast (an average 400 lines, or 5 1/3 columns, an hour, with less than one error per 100 lines) as the automatic Linotypes can cast it, moved TIME'S production chief to say that they are "the best teletypesetters anywhere." I can't testify to that, but I do know that the weekly Publisher's Letter (among the many innovations they have been called upon to set on their machines) is their trickiest job. The perforators were not designed to set type around illustrations, and it takes ingenuity, experience and patience to make up for this lack. Consequently, when this letter is not in on time, I hear about it in no uncertain terms. This time, however, I hope they won't mind its being a little late.

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