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

A great many TIME readers who got last week's issue on the regular day have been asking how we managed to include such a completely thought-through election report--and I think you might be still more interested in the answer if you also knew that:

P: General MacArthur's men in the Philippines got 3,000 copies of this Election Issue just one day after TIME'S publication date.

P:Dr. Alfonso Lopez, President of Colombia, and hundreds of other Latin American subscribers received their copies of the Election Issue (printed in Bogota) just one day later than subscribers in New York and Chicago. P: By the time you read this letter, the full election story will have galloped with TIME'S Pony Edition to our troops in Germany--flown with TIME'S Calcutta Edition to G.I.s deep in the jungles of Burma and India --reached interned U.S. airmen far in the north of Sweden through the pages of the Scandinavian Edition we print behind the German blockade.

We held this issue open until 4:15 Wednesday afternoon te give TIME'S editors time to weigh our correspondents' reports, integrate the last-minute news with our stacks of advance research and write an election report that would be complete and straight and in perspective. And then it was up to our production and distribution men to make up for this almost-a-day-and-a-half delay.

By then our plants in Philadelphia and Chicago and Los Angeles had printed the whole issue except for the election section, so our presses were clear to run the election story at well over 100,000 copies an hour. And we had made special arrangements to fly TIME from our Chicago plant to Texas and Oklahoma --from our Los Angeles plant to Oregon, Nevada and Utah--from New York south to Miami to connect with Friday's Clippers across the Caribbean.

We cabled our election report to our pressmen in Bogota and Sao Paulo--sent it by special facsimile transmission to Buenos Aires -- radio-photoed it to Honolulu so the printers who turn out 100,000 copies of TIME in the mid-Pacific each week could hold to their regular schedules.

All in all, of the nearly 1,900,000 TIME copies now distributed each week, only about 130,000 had to go without the election report. These copies were addressed to states we could not reach by train for Friday delivery from either Philadelphia, Chicago or Los Angeles-- and to which we could not arrange for plane delivery because too many tons of magazines were involved.

To these 130,000 we rushed the election pages separately by plane as fast as the section came off the presses.--

The speed with which this Election Issue was distributed all around the world set some new high marks for our production-distribution team.

But it would also have been impossible without the splendid cooperation of many friends of TIME : airline executives and railroad officials -- postmasters and mail carriers--newsstand distributors-- printers in strange, far places--Army, Navy and Marine Corps officers all over the world.

To all of these, our warmest thanks. Cordially,

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