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

This issue of TIME should reach our readers in Hawaii at the same time it reaches our subscribers on the mainland.

For this week we launched our Pacific edition--the first edition of any national magazine to be printed in Honolulu--and it was printed simultaneously with the regular editions in the continental U.S.

Even two years ago such a venture would still have been visionary and Utopian; but today the tremendous wartime expansion of American aviation makes it possible to fly TIME'S pictures and pages 2,500 air miles across the continent from Philadelphia to San Francisco and then 2,350 miles on out across the Pacific to Hawaii in less than 36 hours.

Early Tuesday morning the pages of this issue were set up in type in Philadelphia. A camera crew was on hand to make photo graphic negatives of each page as fast as the last proofs could be corrected. A 39-ounce packet of these films is rushed aboard the first transcontinental plane. And with any kind of luck in the weather, by early Thursday morning our printers in Honolulu should have received the negatives and be at work making the press plates to run off the edition by offset lithography.

For months we have been working on plans to find the answer for hundreds of readers in Hawaii and hundreds of service men all over the Pacific who have been asking and urging us to get TIME to them faster. For example:

"You would be doing a marvelous service if a new delivery system could be managed," wrote Mrs. Irwin Beadle from Honolulu. "Boat mail is disrupted now, and magazines are weeks behind."

"Could copies be sent airmail?" suggested John Snell of Hawaii's Equal Rights Commission. "TIME is a godsend to us out here in the middle of the Pacific. "And an Army Major has been paying us $1.00 a week ever since October to fly him as many TIME pages as we could cram into an envelope under the two-ounce limit for airmail.

Flying 20,000 copies of TIME out over the Pacific from San Francisco is obviously impossible today. The alternative finally worked out by Bernard Clayton (the head of TIME'S editorial bureau in Honolulu) with the Honolulu Lithograph Company has involved the cooperative purchase of thousands of dollars worth of special magazine equipment. But it is a lasting solution which establishes the Pacific edition of TIME as a permanent venture and makes Hawaii a permanent center for distributing TIME by plane throughout the Pacific area.

All TIME'S news is there unchanged -- but the mainland-edition advertising had to be left out and the weight of the paper had to be held down to the minimum -- partly to save space on the ships that carried the paper to Hawaii, partly to make the printed cop ies as light as possible so they can be rushed on to all our other island out posts in the South Pacific.

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