Sixty years ago this week, two young Yale graduates, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, were about to close the third issue of their new magazine, TIME. It must have been difficult to concentrate on the job at hand because the first returns trickling in from Vol. 1 No. 1 were not all that promising. About 2,500 of the first 5,000 newsstand copies, priced at 15-c-, had gone unsold. One of the other problems was that Roy Larsen, TIME'S first circulation manager, who was to play a role second only to Luce's in the development of Time Inc., had hired some of Hadden's debutante friends to help out in circulation. In their enthusiasm the women had managed to mix up many of the mailing wrappers. Total circulation of the first issue, optimistically projected at 25,000, turned out to be less than 9,000.

Luce had estimated in advance that the new publication was a " 10-to-1 shot." For those investors who had loaned the founding pair $85,675, the odds soon began to look longer than that. Advertising was spotty. The first issue carried only three full-page ads and 18 smaller ones, including a satiric appeal for the "elusive" TIME reader: "Arrest him," the ad implored, "and having gone that far, get his fingerprint. Or his signature on the [subscription] form below." Response, measured in circulation receipts, was slow: $11,486 in March; $17,556 in April; $10,122 in May. But in the second half of 1923, TIME'S average circulation jumped to 18,500, and in October, subscriptions started coming in at a rate that encouraged Luce, Hadden and Larsen to increase the guarantee to 35,000. In 1924, TIME doubled its circulation to 70,000, and just as important, the new magazine began at last to attract advertisers.

Sixty years later, TIME continues to attract advertisers and readers. In 1982, worldwide ad revenues generated $350 million, making TIME No. 1 among all magazines. TIME'S domestic circulation today stands at 4.5 million copies.

When the international editions of TIME, bought by people in 190 countries, are added, TIME'S circulation stands at 5.8 million copies a week.

It commands a weekly worldwide audience of nearly 30 million men and women.

More people in more countries get their news from TIME each week than from any other single source. Today, TIME calls upon 96 correspondents in 33 news bureaus, an editorial staff of 450, and hundreds of stringers. It is the largest news-gathering staff reporting to a single magazine in the entire world. Luce's 10-to-l shot came home. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.