Herewith some incidental intelligence about TIME from our mail of the last few weeks:

James K. Dobbs, millionaire Memphis auto dealer and airport restaurateur, has reported a strange coincidence regarding TIME'S story on him in our Aug. 15 Business & Finance department. "On the day the story appeared," he said, "I boarded a plane going to Dallas. A woman sitting next to me was reading a copy of TIME when all of a sudden she burst out with 'Oh, my goodness!' Everybody on the plane turned around and she exclaimed, pointing to my picture, 'I'm sitting beside you!' "

Since the story appeared, Mr. Dobbs says he has heard from just about everybody he ever knew, from nine railroads (about his plan to supply meals to dining cars), and from hundreds of people who want to work for him or sell him something. Says he: "I can still hardly go anywhere but somebody doesn't say, 'I saw your picture in TIME.' I never knew so many people read TIME."

A reader in Norfolk, Va. asked if we could put him in touch with a subscriber in a country which grows teakwood. He wanted his favorite set of chessmen duplicated in teakwood, and he was willing to pay the cost of the project in TIME subscriptions. We gave him the name of a college student in India who had written us that he wanted very much to subscribe to TIME but couldn't afford it. Later on we hope to hear that they made a deal.

Burke's Peerage Ltd., of London, has written to ask for a copy of The TIME Audience in Heraldry (TIME, Sept. 19), which uses the ancient science of heraldry to symbolize the many groups that make up the readership of TIME. Burke's managing editor, L. G. Pine, passes along the information that heraldry is thriving and that hundreds of grants of arms are being made yearly by the proper heraldic bodies in Great Britain, France, Switzerland, Sweden, the U.S., and many other countries.

Our Oct. 10 Press story (with picture) on good-looking Sheila Daly, teenagers' columnist for the Chicago Tribune and 34 other newspapers, produced, she says, the following reaction : 1 ) Six proposals of marriage, 2) an offer of a date for the Army-Navy football game from a West Point cadet, 3) a score of letters and telegrams on miscellaneous subjects, 4) a visit from a Hollywood representative to discuss a movie about a teen-age girl columnist. Miss Daly thinks that she would like to be technical adviser for that one.

Three years ago L. A. Rojas-Cruz, of Bogota, Colombia, received a letter from us inviting him to subscribe to TIME'S Latin America edition, which is printed in English. Recently we heard from him as follows: "When I received your offer ... I was just starting to take English lessons and I could not read the letter. Now that I can I am anxious to get a subscription . . . and so would like to know the new rate."

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A Frenchman living in Paris sent along the following note with his subscription renewal: "One of the strongest reasons I have for reading TIME, aside from its American viewpoint on world affairs, is that . . . when I read it I feel as if I were in America with its freedom and its wide spaces -- a freedom we have lost in Europe and the space we never had."

Cordially yours,

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