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

With this issue TIME becomes the first national magazine ever printed in California for California readers.

Since TIME began our West Coast subscribers have been getting the first copies off the press each week --rushed overland to them by the fastest trains. But since 1935 our circulation in booming California has been growing 50% faster than the average. Percentagewise we now have more readers there than has any other front-rank magazine. In fact, one out of every thirteen California families reads TIME each week--and it takes more than 130,000 copies for this one state alone.

And now--just when it is so important to get all these copies to the Coast on time--the war-burdened transcontinental trains are finding it harder than ever to make the express speeds at which TIME must travel to reach all our California subscribers by Friday.

One way to meet this transportation problem would have been to send our California copies to press early, leaving out some of the news--but we think we have solved it a better way. For from now on our California subscribers will get their copies of TIME faster--and they will go right on getting exactly the same news that goes into the TIME editions printed in Chicago and Philadelphia.

To do this we will make cellophane transparencies of TIME'S news pages as soon as they are set in type in Chicago--fly two sets to California over different routes--send a third set on the Chief for use in an emergency--and print California's 130,000 copies on the spot at one of the West Coast's most progressive printers, the Adcraft Co. And we will use paper manufactured right on the Pacific Coast, to lighten still further the load on the transcontinental railroads.

The printing will be done by offset lithography on two high-speed, roll-fed presses which will dry the printing ink instantaneously by speeding the web of paper through infra-red rays. Incidentally, the magazine use of this equipment is such a new development that in a day when no new presses can be built we could not have started this venture if we had not located our second press 2,000 miles away in Detroit--and if our printers had not obtained WPB permission to move the press and other equipment to the Coast by pointing out all the transcontinental transportation TIME'S California edition would save.

"Please accept my thanks along with those of the whole West Coast for this forward step," wired Los Angeles aviation tycoon "Dutch" Kindelberger. "Good news indeed," echoed University of California President Robert G. Sproul. "I hope other publishers will accept the challenge."

This new TIME edition is really just another example of the way TIME has "gone West to grow up with the country." For TIME was the first U.S. magazine to open a news bureau on the Pacific Coast.

A year later we made this into two--one in San Francisco, one in Los Angeles. And today there are more than 30 TIME & LIFE people working on the Coast.

We hope this California printing will be the smooth-running end-product of all the experiments we have conducted in getting out our editions in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Sweden, Egypt, Persia, India, Australia and Hawaii. And unless the planes are grounded between Chicago and the Coast, all our subscribers in California should get their copies by Friday.

Cordially,

P.S. And subscribers from the Appalachians to the Rockies should get their copies earlier too--for shifting this printing load of 130,000 copies to the Coast will move up our other shipments from Chicago four hours all along the line.

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