Neither TIME nor, so far as I am aware, any other of our magazines has ever before published a story quite like the Toynbee article.

This judgment by Benjamin H. Kizer, of the University of Washington's political science department, is the keynote of much of the mail we have received as a result of TIME'S March 17th cover story on Britain's Philosopher-Historian Arnold J. Toynbee and his monumental work on the rise & fall of civilizations.

Many of you asked for reprints of the story to pass along to friends, associates, students, and others who might have missed it or "ought to read it." We made reprints available to anyone who wanted them, and offered them to others we thought would be interested. To date, the response has been overwhelming.

It has come from professors of history, philosophy and anthropology, from deans of American colleges and universities, heads of public and private schools, and from educators like Chairman John Hooper, of the Vermont State Board of Education, who wanted reprints "so that I may redistribute them to key people in the field of Vermont education."

The governors of seven states have been heard from, as have businessmen, Congressmen, plain citizens, radio broadcasters, journalists (Wrote Edgar Ansel Mowrer. New York Post columnist and foreign affairs expert: "Never before, in my judgment, has any American magazine printed anything quite as important . . .")-In particular, the clergy has been strongly represented--the General Commission on Army and Navy Chaplains, for example, having requested 1,700 reprints for distribution to Armed Forces chaplains everywhere.

This reaction has been of unusual interest to TIME'S editors. For them, the story of Historian Toynbee and his work in progress was an unusual challenge and opportunity. They were concerned with introducing to TIME'S readers a creative scholar whose deliberations on the course of civilizations were not widely known in the U.S. outside of academic circles. But seldom has an academic subject been so newsworthy.

Quotations from Toynbee had appeared in TIME'S text and footnotes for many years. Periodically he was suggested as a cover subject by one or another of TIME'S editors who had profited from reading him, but the moment never seemed quite right. It seemed eminently right when the Oxford University Press announced that his six-volume work would be made available to laymen in abridged form --for Toynbee's fresh viewpoint on history was more than ever applicable to the difficult problems of today.

Last fall the story was turned over to TIME'S Special Projects department (TIME, Feb. 10). and the background work began. A correspondent from our London bureau interviewed Toynbee's friends, associates, admirers, detractors. A researcher set out to read all of the 3,488 pages of A Study of History, as did the writer assigned to the story. Both of them saw Arnold Toynbee when he arrived here this year to lecture. The writer's problem was how to make this monumental material and complicated thought briefly and clearly communicable.

Of the many expressions of approval TIME has received, one, perhaps, illustrates best the kind of reaction TIME'S editors hoped for in doing the Toynbee story: "In these days when Americans are called upon to make decisions of direct consequence to the whole world, they should understand something of the nature and course of civilization. TIME and Toynbee have helped to fill that need."

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