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

"One smashed typewriter--$55.30."

Sometimes these little lost property items on our correspondents' expense accounts have quite a story behind them.

For example, there was Harry Zinder's typewriter. This one was lost in a desert plane crash as he flew out from Cairo to cover the disastrous tank battle from which Rommel's Afrika Korps swept on to El Alamein. And five months later when the British started winning, Walter Graebner's typewriter turned up missing--that was a casualty out of a jouncing jeep as Graebner rode through Tobruk with General Montgomery's Eighth Army.

There was the typewriter John Hersey lost during the Sicilian campaign when his plane cracked up near Gela the fourth time he flew in from North Africa (but his typewriter was a less interesting story than Hersey's suitcase which went to the bottom of the Pacific last October with the aircraft carrier Hornet).

There was Teddy White's typewriter, smashed in transit from Colombo to New Delhi in the days when the Japs were expected to swoop down on India at any moment. (That was not a total loss--Teddy had it welded together by a Moslem craftsman in the bazaars, is still using it to bang out his cables to TIME from Chungking.)

And there was the typewriter Jack Belden lost over the side of his landing boat when he plunged neck-high into the waters of the Mediterranean to wade ashore with our troops before their first dawn on Sicily.

But many more things than typewriters have blazed the trail of TIME'S correspondents across the newsfronts of this war. There was the shoe James Aldridge kicked off in his hurry to duck the shooting in the Axis-inspired "bread" riots in Teheran last December. There was the shaving brush William Howland lost at Norman Wells on the Mackenzie River getting TIME'S story on the building of the Alcan Highway (Howland had quite a beard before he could get another way up there under the Arctic Circle). There was the bed roll, complete with six blankets, sheets, socks and handkerchiefs, that Senior Editor Charles Wertenbaker lost at Constantine in Algeria (that was just plain swiped, and there were many nights during the North African campaign when Wertenbaker cursed the thief who made off with it). And there was the gear Will Lang left behind him in Feriana on the border of Tunisia last February. Lang was at the front with General Fredendall's troops when Rommel's surprise attack swept into Feriana--captured the town and all Lang's things with it.

Not lost but as good as lost was the trunk in which Stephen Laird packed all his belongings when he went out to take charge of our Berlin office in the days before Pearl Harbor--for it disappeared completely until two days before Laird left the Reich on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Russia. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether the trunk had really gone astray or whether it had just been held up by the German police. Anyhow, all Laird got out of it in Germany was some stale chocolate which came in handy on his train trip to the Swiss frontier.

Perhaps I should add to this list of the lost, strayed or stolen the completely furnished farmhouse where the head of our Paris office was living when France fell. Probably some Nazi officer has been making himself at home there for the past three years.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.