To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

Dear Subscriber There is so much important, uncensored information in our files and on our desks these days that all last week we were busy being photographed and fingerprinted here at TIME--to make sure only people who belong here are admitted to our floors.

Although the fingerprinting was a new experience, it was just one of many the war has brought. For the people at TIME live so close to the news that they can't help feeling much of it as a personal experience--and so hardly a week goes by that they are not up to their ears in some new war interest or activity.

For example, very few of us had ever been blood donors until last spring, but now almost every one at TIME who is able has given one pint of blood to the Red Cross, and many two or three.

Every floor had its own tinfoil collection depot--we've had our own rubber and scrap metal reclamation day--almost a hundred of us have graduated from the First Aid classes we held five nights a week in our reception room--and the Treasury Department gave us its Certificate of Merit for the number of employees who signed up to buy bonds regularly in our own War Bond Drive.

So far two girls have left us to enlist (one in the WAVES, the other in the WAACS) and the plaque in our reception room shows that 173 TIME Inc. men are now in military service.

And this does not include the names of 14 other employees who resigned their jobs for the duration to do special work for the OFF, COI, Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and other government bureaus and agencies. Nor does it include correspondents Carl and Shelley Mydans, who were taken prisoner by the Japs and interned at Santo Tomas University in the Philippines (we have just received the cheering news that they were recently transferred to Shanghai, where the first thing Shelley did was to hunt up a hairdresser).

Two of the names on the plaque are in gold: Correspondent Mel Jacoby, killed in a plane crash at MacArthur's headquarters in Australia, and the MARCH OF TIME's Harry Garvin, killed in action with the RAF in the Middle East. Across the top of the plaque are the words: "For the Freedom of all People."

Last February some of TIME's employees joined their friends on LIFE and FORTUNE to organize a Dish-It-Out Party for Navy Relief which more than a thousand people attended. And with Victory Gardening such a big part of the national picture we have just held a Country Fair--which may come as a surprise to some of our subscribers who perhaps think of our editors as city slickers.

Everyone at TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE with anything from a window box to a farm in the country was invited to display his produce in the reception room, and when the judges had cast their final vote we found that TIME's exhibitors had made out pretty well. TIME's General Manager somehow took the blue ribbon for preserves and the Managing Editor of the MARCH OF TIME on the Air won the title "best farmer" with photographs of his Aberdeen-Angus cattle.

With U.S. food scarcities looming ever bigger, we will probably have another Country Fair next year. Everybody seemed to have a first-rate time at this one. I guess there haven't been so many people in our reception room since the New York World's Fair when we threw it open to our readers as part of our Subscribers' Library.

Cordially,

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