TIME has never been a magazine for everybody--and yet right now TIME's circulation is more than 2,300,000.

A little more than 1,300,000 copies are distributed here in the United States--and 1,000,000 more are circulated overseas, mostly, of course, among our armed forces.

This is still pretty small compared with circulation giants like LIFE and the Saturday Evening Post --but it is many times higher than TIME'S young founders ever dreamed their Newsmagazine could possibly grow. (As late as 1933 there were some very serious discussions here about whether TIME would still be TIME if we let it cross the 500,000 mark.)

How did TIME get so big without lowering its sights? How did so many people come to read and like and keep on buying a magazine which has always been written uncompromisingly for a special kind of audience--an audience with the interests of the educated person and the executive who moves with his times?

We set out to find the answer to that question a few months ago--and some of the things we uncovered are so fascinating (and may be such news to you) that I thought I would record them here.

The essence of what we found out was this: 1) TIME is still edited for the same kind of people it began being edited for . . . 2) TIME hasn't changed in this respect, but the nation has . . . for 3) there are a lot more people of the kind who would like TIME in America today than ever before.

For example, we found that in the first twenty years after TIME began, the number of U.S. college graduates grew eight times as fast as the total population . . . high school graduates twelve times as fast . . . women college graduates ten times as fast. So a large part of the answer to how TIME has grown so big can be found in the education figures in the U.S. Census Office.

The other half of the answer is suggested by a curious fact. There are lots more business executives in the U.S. today even though there are fewer U.S. businesses. The number of manufacturing executives in the U.S. has grown twice as fast as the total population--although the 1939 census shows fewer manufacturers than in 1919. This is because the businesses we have are being conducted differently.

Are you old enough to remember the typical 1920 manufacturing plant --and how it looked "like a shoe-box with a saltcellar in front of it?" There was a great long brick mill (the plant) standing behind a very small management building (the office).

Today the management staff of that same company would probably require an "office" half as big as the 1920 plant. For odds are it would include a purchasing department with two or three specialists, a research department with several engineers, a traffic, cost-control, personnel department and several others. And each of these departments requires the services of a specialist or manager to share the vastly increased responsibilities without which America could never have won this war or attained her present standard of peacetime living.

Specialists like these increased about 100% between 1920 and 1940 and have been increasing still faster under the impact of full production.

These many new executives (and those millions of new college graduates) include hundreds of thousands of men and women who feel they want TIME's weekly help in following today's important and confusing news. It is among-people like these that TIME has found its great new audience.

Cordially,

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