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

If you remember the Background for War series which TIME began publishing just four months before Hitler's armies marched into Poland, I think you may find it almost exciting news that we are now launching a Background for Peace series on page 77 of this week's issue.

When Background for War was reprinted in booklet form it sold more copies than any other non-fiction war book has ever sold and became the standard text for studying the war in hundreds of colleges and schools the country over. The purpose of Background for Peace is exactly the same as the purpose of Background for War--to give our subscribers a living understanding of the great new problems and questions Americans may soon be called upon to face. Now as always TIME'S aim is to inform rather than to make recommendations--to-give you the factual and ideological background you need to make up your own minds intelligently.

To do this job, we have assigned a team of seven to Background for Peace, headed by the very able former managing editor of FORTUNE; Richardson Wood. Working with him are four researchers and two of TIME'S very best writers--Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Cantwell. Cantwell, who wrote the first Background for Peace article this week, also wrote the first Background for War--May 1, 1939.

Launching Background for Peace has been almost like launching a new magazine. As long ago as last October this staff began researching, writing and editing experimental 8-page sections, even going so far as to set them up in type and printing a few copies. By Christmas the experiments were coming along well enough so that we almost included an 8-page Background for Peace in our January 4 issue. At the last moment we decided it was still not quite in the groove, so instead we mailed out copies to a few thousand subscribers and a few hundred outstanding postwar planners, inviting their criticisms and suggestions. So many helpful ideas came through that we were very glad we had waited.

Our work on Background for Peace, however, really goes back far beyond last October, It goes back to December 1941, right after Pearl Harbor, when TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE combined to set up a postwar research department headed by Raymond Leslie Buell, former President of the Foreign Policy Association. Today this department consists partly of our top editors and executives, partly of outstanding economists and experts on world affairs--is headed by an erstwhile senior editor of TIME, "John Knox Jessup. There are a total of 20 people on the postwar staff--and they have gathered together and digested a staggering amount of information.

Background for Peace articles will appear every three or four weeks.

TIME correspondents on five continents worked with the editors on this week's Background for Peace. Each interviewed scores of people: small shopkeepers in Mexico, coolies in the fields around Chungking, businessmen in Rio, ranchers in Australia, men and women in London pubs, U.S. war-workers and farmers and doctors and retailers, asking, "What do you want in your postwar world?" And the answers, as you will see, came with a curious, simple dignity and consistency.

After the article was written, the editors rewrote it six times over before they felt it measured up to its theme. For its purpose is a tremendous one--to "spin the world" and let you visualize its 2,000,000,000 people with all their conflicts, hopes and aspirations--to help you think of the peace not in arbitrary terms of fixing new frontiers and imposing just penalties, but in human terms of the lives and dreams of all the peoples of the earth.

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