As a result of a special offer we made just once when TIME was very young, 189 of you (or your heirs) will receive TIME without further cost as long as we publish it.

As far as we know, the offer was unique in U.S. publishing--a perpetual subscription to TIME for $60. We made it about 20 years ago for a very limited time and then withdrew it forever. It was clearly a perpetual, not a lifetime subscription, transferable, inheritable, noncancelable, and -it was good until the end of TIME, the Weekly Newsmagazine.

The perpetual subscribers never had to be reminded that their subscriptions were up for renewal. Nor did they have any reason for getting in touch with us beyond recording a change of address now and then or writing an occasional letter-to-the-editor. Recently it occurred to us that we knew very little about these very special readers--and we ought to know a great deal about any group which had so much faith in the then unproved TIME idea that it would accept such an offer.

We wrote and found that four of the perpetual subscribers had been willed their subscriptions. A former Yale biologist philosophized: "No matter how broke I get I will always have something to will." Another said, "I regard it as the best investment I ever made"--a sentiment echoed by many. A U.S. Army intelligence officer wrote: "When I subscribed, I figured this is a new slant on the news--this will succeed." A social science teacher, who used TIME in her classes, explained: "After I married and became a homemaker I needed TIME more than ever to keep me in touch with what was happening." Some just "decided to take a chance." Others felt at the time like the English professor, who said: "In 1929 or '30 I had lost what seemed to me so much money in investments that I decided I would invest $60 in TIME [with the hope that] I would come out even in 1948 or 1949." Said a librarian: "I often answered the telephone in the Chatham Square branch of the New York Public Library when TIME was on the other end."

Professor Emeritus George H. Shull, of Princeton, had this to say: "Why did I invest in a perpetual subscription? Believe it or not, I did it because I thought that in this way I could help in the establishment of a type of periodical previously non-existent and which seemed to me to promise the greatest possible contribution to a self-governing democracy."

And an educator (founder of The MacJannet American School at St. Cloud, France) reported: "Our school was at the crossroads of the world and a number of our students [who studied TIME] in those early days have since appeared in headlines in TIME. The Duke of Edinburgh, as the little exiled Prince Philip of Greece, Princess Anne de Bourbon (she was more of a tomboy than a student), John Eisenhower . . ."

The occupations of these TIME Perpetuals include lawyers (unsurprisingly, the largest group) bankers, educators, clergymen (including Cardinal Spellman), consular officials, members of the armed forces, a farmer, a retired blueberry grower, a clock maker, college professors, doctors, engineers, a textile manufacturer, a lithographer, a building contractor, a housewife-concert pianist.

They must think we're doing pretty well today. None said that he was dissatisfied with our magazine. One felt that TIME had grown more kindly with age; another wanted to be reassured that we would never let TIME "get too long (its main virtue to me is that a busy man can keep well posted with certainty and minimum effort by reading every word every week)."

Needless to say, TIME is offering no more perpetual subscriptions. But we are making a note to query these 189 every generation.

Cordially yours,

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