The 3^ years I have been away during the war gave me a valuable firsthand understanding of how very important the news in TIME has become to intelligent people all over the world.

TIME has acquired its standing with foreign audiences almost by accident. I can personally report to you only what happened in the Mediterranean area, but our files are full of evidence that exactly the same sort of thing happened elsewhere. It began when TIME started printing special editions for our armed forces abroad--editions which eventually totaled nearly a million locally printed copies every week.

Though primarily intended for men in the services, copies immediately began to reach people high in government and business circles all through the Mediterranean area. These copies were passed from hand to hand, were read, spelled out, fingered over by literally hundreds of important people starved for straight, clear news of America and the rest of the world.

I was in Rome on February 20 of this year when the first locally printed issue of TIME went on the newsstands at 10 lire. Until that day only a few copies had been coming into Italy by boat and these were three or four weeks old on arrival. Not only was it a red-letter day for us Americans, but numerous Italians queued up with U.S. and British soldiers wherever TIME was on sale.

TIME'S Rome distributor estimates that Romans purchase 2,000 copies of TIME each week -- even though TIME, of course, is printed in English.

In Marshal Tito's Belgrade,' despite the fact that French, not English, is overwhelmingly the second language--the demand for TIME was so great that Yugoslavia's leading newsdealer kept asking again and again for 1,500 copies a week on a no-return basis.

And in Bulgaria, currently so much in the international spotlight, Russian officers, Bulgarian government officials, national party chiefs, and newspaper editors are getting their copies of TIME almost every week--flown in for special distribution by the U.S. Mission in Sofia. The demand far exceeds the supply, which is held down by lack of plane space and the bad flying conditions notorious in the Balkans.

The Mediterranean just happens to be the part of the world where I saw TIME'S foreign audience taking shape. Similar stories keep coming in from wherever TIME is circulated abroad.

I have talked with many intelligent people who are members of this great new TIME audience overseas--and all through what they say runs the same reason for their reading TIME every week as intently and thoroughly as they do. It isn't just a matter of keeping their tabletalk up-to-date or even of keeping informed as you and I do: to be able to think and function as intelligent citizens.

They feel that the war has focused their whole world on America--that now, in the postwar, it is vital to their countries and their businesses to know-what is happening in America and what Americans are thinking and talking about. TIME, they say, does that job for them.

Cordially,

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