Every issue of TIME has a dividend of information which you can accept or reject, as you choose. This dividend is the footnotes that punctuate your copy of TIME. They consist, generally, of material which could not be incorporated in the main body of a story without interrupting its continuity. Therefore, you can, if you wish, ignore them without losing the sense of the story. The subject has been a continuous and pleasant controversy for the pro and anti footnoters among you.

It began with TIME'S first footnote--dropped from a Press story, in the May 12, 1923 issue, on the Christian Science Monitor's attitude toward prohibition. The footnote read, in part: "It must not be inferred from the above that TIME objects to strenuous advocacy of Prohibition. Let Prohibition be supported; let it be attacked; but always fairly supported or fairly attacked. Few public questions have been so mangled by the press as this Prohibition. . . ."

Three years after this maiden venture TIME'S editors put the controversy it aroused to a vote of TIME'S readers. They--and there must be many of you still among them--were 20 to 1 for footnotes. So TIME'S footnotes tiptoed on. Today they fall into three general categories: 1) learned, 2) explanatory, 3) anecdotal.

Some footnotes require more work and research than the stories they hang from, and it is a rare footnote that doesn't produce some interesting and unexpected result. For instance, Managing Editor T. S. Matthews dropped a footnote -- definitely on the learned side -- from a Science story about the chimney swift. The footnote was a stanza from a poem about a curlew, by W. B. Yeats. A researcher who was dispatched to the public library to find and check the verse, being in no mood to go through all of Yeats' works, finally telephoned the English department of Columbia University and asked for their expert on Yeats. He was at home, preparing a bottle for his baby. When the professor had finished his chore, he found the poem, after some searching, and found also, to everyone's pleasure, that Matthews had it right from memory, punctuation and all.

Although TIME'S footnotes serve many different functions, our editors have found them an ideal device for disposing of long, dull Government reports, etc. whose gist can be given in a paragraph or two. They work hard at this kind of condensation, but occasionally the subject matter will not condense. Once, for instance, one of our National Affairs writers had to explain the game of poker in a footnote (the subject had come up on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and it was news). On his first try, the footnote turned out to be almost as long as the story it referred to. As printed, it was half a column long, ending with the admonition: "Since a large part of the game consists in guessing the value of the opponents' cards, absolute control of facial expression is essential." His reward was a letter from a grateful reader who said he had never understood the game before.

Because of the time and work they require, TIME'S footnotes are undoubtedly the most expensive editorial wordage in the magazine. One holds some kind of TIME record. It was an attempt to discover the highest price ever paid for a magazine article. George Bernard Shaw claimed he had been offered it. But a week of research, cables and phone calls to Shaw and others produced a 12-line footnote (at some $25 a word) to the effect that so far as TIME could discover in 1937 the $30,000 paid to the late President Calvin Coolidge for a single magazine piece was tops. The footnote never got printed: it was dropped in last-minute makeup. It reposes in our morgue--a minute monument to TIME'S belief in the cardinal virtue of curiosity.

Cordially,

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