Of TIME'S total overseas circulation, more than 125,000 newsstand copies of the Latin American, Pacific and Atlantic editions are now sold by approximately 100 local distributors, three times as many as there were at the end of World War II. Recently, I heard from two of TIME'S postwar distributors, describing their experiences in getting started in business after several years of enemy occupation. Wrote K. C. Chain, TIME-LIFE distributor on the island of Formosa:

"When Formosa was liberated from the Japanese occupation in 1945, I felt that the English language should be promoted . . . in order that our people could absorb Western culture and exchange ideas with American and European countries. I had five associates with similar ideas, and we organized under the name of the Formosan Magazine Press. Our first venture was a monthly magazine in English . . . But the economic fluctuations of those days in Formosa were too much for us, and we suspended publication after ten months . . .

"Two of us, S. C. Yeh and I, visited the library of the U.S. Information Service to read some American magazines and books, and suddenly got our inspiration; we would import American magazines to Formosa . . . We chose TIME, LIFE and Reader's Digest to begin with because these three magazines are the most widely read all over the world . . .

"We started in October 1946 . . . But this island had been closed behind a kind of Iron Curtain by the Japanese ever since the Manchuria incident in 1931, so there were very few people with even a fair reading knowledge of English . . . By good luck we got an excellent American professor, Mr. W. Dorland, who came to Formosa from Peking. We opened a night English school and it was an immediate success, enrolling from 300 to 400 students per month. Our magazine sales began increasing rapidly . . .

"Now we have 56 sub-distributors throughout the cities and towns of the island. Besides this, we have established three streamlined newsstands in the capital, Taipei . . . Our American magazine business has at present reached a total of 15,000 copies on sale per month. TIME & LIFE are far in the lead. We have in six years increased our sales until now they stand at 3,500 copies of TIME and 5,000 copies of LIFE per month. That, we feel, is a real achievement for all of us here in Formosa."

From across another ocean Denmark Distributor Rudolf Fardal also wrote of his first experiences with TIME. He was a distributor of Swedish newspapers and magazines, most of them banned during the German occupation. One day in 1945, he received word that a TIME Inc. representative would like to talk to him in Stockholm. To get permission to make the trip, Fardal concocted an elaborate ruse. About a year earlier, he had become the Danish representative for a paper mill in Gothenburg, Sweden. So he arranged surreptitiously to have this firm send him a letter offering to ship a large quantity of toilet paper, then badly needed in Denmark. On the strength of this offer, the Nazis permitted him to go to Sweden.

Wrote Fardal: "I made the agreement with TIME'S representatives in Stockholm that I should have 15,000 copies (a considerable amount for a small country like Denmark) of the first issue of TIME published after the capitulation of the Germans . . . In May 1945, I received the ordered number of the issue with Hitler's face struck out by a cross on the cover [TIME, May 7, 1945]. All were sold from a couple of kiosks in the center of Copenhagen within a few hours."

Last summer Fardal's daughter Lena worked in the TIME & LIFE offices in Paris. Since then, she has joined her father's business and is being trained to succeed him. If her business sense matches her appearance (see cut), the firm has a promising future.

Cordially yours,

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