Dear TIME-Reader:

THIS year has been one of many milestones for our TIME-LIFE International Division. In the spring the combined net paid circulation of TLI magazines passed the one million mark. And this month the Atlantic and Pacific editions of TIME are ten years old.

By way of celebration, the division has prepared an informal history of a decade of its overseas publishing operations. Although it is an intramural document, I thought I would pass along to you a few of the highlights that pertain to TIME.

TIME-LIFE International was founded on the belief that there is "one world" of ideas and aspirations operating within (and often in spite of) the confines of national boundaries, that there existed an international family of potential TiME-readers who shared an intelligent curiosity about the affairs of man that cut across these boundaries.

At the end of World War II, we began to consolidate our 21 widely scattered editions, including the wartime V-mail miniature which many an ex-G.I. still keeps as a souvenir of his overseas duty. These became TIME Atlantic, printed in Paris; TIME Pacific, printed in Tokyo; TIME Latin America, printed in Havana, and TIME Canadian, printed in Chicago.

The mechanics of printing TIME simultaneously at scattered points also were simplified. The production system begins in Chicago where proofs of editorial and advertising matter are pulled on high-gloss enamel paper for each international edition. These pasted-up pages are then photographed, and a set of the so-called film positives is dispatched by air to each printing point overseas, where the local printer makes offset plates directly from the film.

ONCE printed, the magazines are sent to more than 700 distributing agencies over 400,000 miles of air routes and 200,000 miles of ocean, e.g., from the Tokyo printer to Auckland, N.Z. is an 8,200-mile airlift. Broken-field running through a maze of import controls, taxes and quotas, TLI often comes up against fluctuating money markets, which in the past year, for example, caused one nation's currency to drop from 300 to 780 to the dollar, and another's from 1,500 to 3,000.

Despite such intercontinental migraines, to say nothing of frequent bannings and occasional confiscations, TLI now delivers some 400,000 copies of TIME each week to every corner of the earth, all before the issue date. Among these foreign subscribers, the most common name worldwide is Smith (it's Hansen in Scandinavia, Singh in Asia, Garcia in Latin America). For the most part the subscribers are in business, government and the professions. But whatever their names or jobs, these overseas TIME families tend to support our original assumption. Says the TLI history: "Our readers abroad are a remarkably homogeneous group--a kind of worldwide family whose fundamental likenesses are not obscured by differences of race, religion or national allegiance."

Cordially yours,

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