If you wanted to tell people outside of the U.S. that they can now subscribe to TIME, how would you go about it? Where would you get their names and addresses?

This was one of the important questions TIME had to try to answer when we decided to convert our wartime International editions (set up to serve U.S. military needs) to civilian editions all over the world. We knew that the war had multiplied the curiosity of people everywhere about the U.S. and the U.S. viewpoint on practically everything. We also hoped that there was a demand for TIME abroad & beyond that of the thousands of foreign citizens who wrote us during the war asking how & when they could get TIME.

How could we reach all these people?

We began our experiment with France, hoping to apply the lessons learned there to other non-English-speaking countries later on.

For a starter, we had the names & addresses of our 418 pre-war French subscribers. Our Paris office augmented this list with candidates chosen from pages torn out of directories, telephone books, Who's Who (prewar edition), from lists of Government officials, doctors, lawyers, university professors and other professionals, businessmen (especially those engaged in foreign trade), teachers of English, etc. To decipher and cull these lists, remove duplications, get the correct addresses and salutations, we hired five French girls who knew their France.

Their work involved all sorts of complications. The war had erased streets, arrondissements and, occasionally, towns.

Some of our prospective readers had died or were "missing." Others, including "an occasional movie actress." had been shot or otherwise dispatched by the French Underground as traitors to

France. Nevertheless, the girls did well. Only two per cent of our letters came back marked Retour a Venvoyeur.

Since then, we have sent out similar mailings to potential subscribers in Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, and Egypt. Each list has presented its own particular difficulties and idiosyncrasies.

For instance, the Germans, who thought that they were there for keeps, revised Holland's Who's Who during the occupation, garnishing it with a title-page photograph of Adolf Hitler and eight pages of Dutch "patriots" who were killed by their countrymen for serving the invaders.

One of the severest obstacles to foreigners who want to subscribe to American magazines is the international currency situation. Fluctuations in exchange make it difficult to set a permanent subscription price. Stringent currency regulations often make it impossible for subscribers to get dollars with which to pay for their subscriptions. In a few other cases government censorship is the stumbling block.

So far, the problem has been solved in some 21 countries, including, among others, Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Latin America, the Middle East, and most of Western Europe. This Christmas almost all of TIME's more than a quarter of a million civilian subscribers and newsstand buyers outside the U.S. can use their local currencies (kronor, piastres, rupees, bolivars, etc.) to buy their own subscriptions or to send TIME as a gift to a friend any place in the world where U.S. periodicals can be mailed.

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