DearTIME-Reader:

WE had everything going for us --printing, transportation and weather," grinned Bill Evans of TIME'S Production and Distribution Division.

He was talking about Production and Distribution's record delivery of our special election issue last week. P&D got the last election copy from the editors in New York at 1:50 p.m. Wednesday. By 7 p.m. that same day in Chicago, trucks were hauling bundles of TIME to the airport. The magazine went on sale at Los Angeles' International Airport at 9:30 p.m. Other copies were in New York for delivery at 3 o'clock next morning.

TIME had held open its editorial pages 2 1/2 days to get the full election story, and it was P&D's job to cut that to a one-day delay in delivery of the magazine to readers. P&D had lined up additional presses at our Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles plants, to boost production to a twice-normal total of 149,000 copies an hour. Its traffic men plotted split-second schedules of distribution by truck, rail, all available regular airline service, and ten chartered planes. Across the U.S. our own circulation men, including TIME Circulation Director Bernhard M. Auer and Newsstand Managers Mark Slater and W. Stuart Powers, and 100 Select Magazines, Inc. distributors stood by to speed deliveries.

A bobble anywhere could jam the whole program, it was that tight. Traffic men in Chicago, where more than half the issue was printed, sweated out a week of fog, but the weather cleared in time for the airlift. Deliveries went off on stepped-up schedule in all states except North and South Carolina. Copies destined for those states were held up when an Eastern Airlines plane ran into a flight of ducks, damaged its tail and had to return to Chicago.

To Cleveland, where all three of the city's daily newspapers are strikebound, TIME brought the first detailed printed news of the election. As soon as Bill Schroeder opened his news and book store (see cut) on Public Square, a news-hungry crowd rushed in, a customer cried: "Here's TIME!" and the magazine was a quick sellout. It was much the same at other downtown newsstands and neighborhood drugstores. Said the struck Cleveland Press's Editor Louis B. Seltzer: "I sat here reading the election story and found myself more and more amazed. With the speed of a daily, TIME had gotten out and distributed nationwide a story that was a model of thoroughness and accuracy."

Cordially yours,

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