To conduct our business properly we have to know a great deal not only about the news but also about you. To find out about you--and about such sundry subjects as the paper and ink we use, the state of the nation's education, etc.--requires the same kind of painstaking research we do in order to authenticate the news we print.

Consequently, we have a large staff

of research experts, statisticians, tabulators, etc. who spend all their time on a continuing series of projects which can best be lumped under the title of non-editorial research. Here are some examples of their work:

For business reasons we like to know who you are, what you do, eat, wear, think, etc., and I must say that your response to our questionnaires indicates that you have a good time filling them out. A recent one entitled None of Our Business disclosed, among such pertinent information as the fact that 87% of you own one or more cars and 48% of you go to church fairly regularly, the incidental intelligence that 8.7% of you (male) have taken out a patent on something you invented and 15.6% of you (male) take setting-up exercises in the morning.

Significantly, in a recent study called 40 Years of Going to College, we found that in half a generation the number of formally educated people in America had doubled. Although the U.S. population had increased only 43% since 1910, managers were up 91%, salaried professionals 126%, technicians 226%, etc. What did that mean to us?

Well, TIME presupposes a certain amount of education on the part of its. readers, and the more people there are in the kind of pursuits where keeping informed is a necessity, the more potential readers of TIME there are. So our study helped explain TIME'S steadily growing circulation, because there are a great many more eligible TIME readers around these days than ever before.

We also like to know what magazines different groups of people read and how they regard TIME. More often than not, the answer is very encouraging. For instance, a recent survey of the 6,000 scientists working for the wartime Office of Scientific Development and Research disclosed that a majority of them read TIME regularly and prefer it to any other magazine. We got similar or even better answers from graduates of colleges and universities like Princeton, Dartmouth and Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Washington's top officials, and U.S. obstetricians.

Having known for a long time that TIME readers are veteran travelers (one out of every four TIME families has been to Europe; 46,800 have toured the Far East in a non-military capacity), we decided to find out recently what your postwar vacation plans are. More than 600,000 of you say you are heading for Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean; twice as many are going somewhere in the U.S. or Canada; and, when longer trips and cruises are available, you are going to take those, too. Altogether, you say you are going to do twice as much traveling as before the war.

Sometimes we pass on information like this to people we think would be interested in it. For instance, our research into the problem of jobs for returning veterans ended up in a booklet called Reemployment of Veterans, which so impressed the War Department that they ordered copies for their orientation sections, convalescent hospitals, etc.

Other surveys are for our personal benefit only. One of them tried to find out why our TIME & LIFE Building elevators were so overcrowded and made so many stops. Part of the answer was the heavy traffic in TIME Inc. people stepping out for a snack at the milk bar or a cup of coffee downstairs. We didn't want to do

anything about that, but we did put in a dumbwaiter to keep mail-delivering office girls out of the elevators.

Cordially,

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