To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

The twenty years since TIME began have seen so many changes in the world which TIME reports that we often wonder if TIME'S readers have changed, too. So every now and then we make a survey to find out just what kind of men and women our editors are writing TIME for at that particular moment.

We took our most recent look at you last June when we sent an eight-page questionnaire to a cross-section of 20,000 subscribers. (It began "Do You Own a Stirrup Pump?"; our prewar surveys used to begin "Do You Own a Horse?".)

And perhaps you would be interested in some of the things we learned from it about you and your 1,100,000 fellow TIME-buyers.

One change we discovered is that 39,000 of you were already in uniform last June, so the figure must be around 70,000 by now. Nearly 80% held commissions, and perhaps this explains why 67.2% of the officers stationed in Washington were recently found to be regular readers of TIME.

A strange thing about you is that you don't seem to get much older; and even though TIME has always been a magazine for young men and women, it strikes us as pretty interesting that judging by your median age you have grown only a month older in the past three years.

Some 268,000 of you have changed jobs in the past four years, but the overall pattern of your jobs is still pretty much the same. Of the 641,000 of you who are in business, 454,000 are executives--and among you are about half the officers and directors of practically every well-known corporation in the U.S. Seventy-seven thousand of you are educators, 41,000 lawyers, 49,000 doctors and dentists (that's about one in every four), and 22,000 clergymen (that's about one in every six). You hold 82,000 jobs in government, and this fall we made a special study of TIME'S readership in Washington and found that 64.7% of the top officials in important Federal Departments and Agencies are regular readers of TIME.

For such busy people, you find plenty to do in your leisure hours: swimming, of course, and golf and tennis and cards -- 45% of you make a hobby of photography, 44% work in the garden, 19% own boats, 11% play chess -- more than one out of ten of you sing in public. And you read so many books (an average of about 23 books a year each) that the readers of TIME account for more than half of all the members of the Book of the Month Club.

You have taken on a great deal more than your share of social and civic activities and civilian defense. Of the men who are not in uniform, for example, 310,000 hold offices outside their own businesses -- on school boards, in churches, in local government -- and 440,000 are doing war work as spotters, air raid wardens and the like.

Of the women, 766,000 are engaged in anywhere from one to a dozen community activities -- and 344,000 of you are doing your part for civilian defense.

And just to give you another dimension on yourselves, when TIME wrote and asked you to help the people of China last year, more than 30,000 of you sent United China Relief an average of more than $6 each --and the Red Cross estimates that the readers of TIME and its sister magazines gave more than $400,000 as a direct traceable result of our special appeal for their first war drive.

One of the most interesting figures brought out by our survey is that TIME is now read by even more women than men -- by about 10,000 more women, in fact. But the thing we get the greatest kick out of is still the pleasant fact that you vote 7 to 1 that TIME is your favorite magazine among all the magazines you read.

Cordially,

P.S. about that Stirrup Pump: Only 27 of you who answered our questionnaire say you do own one.

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