Edgar Baker of TIME-LIFE International, publishers and distributors of our overseas editions, returned last week from a six months' business trip to the South Pacific, Malaya and India, where he experienced the usual quota of unexpected surprises and contradictions.

In India, for instance, he found that sending telegrams was a fruitless occupation because the operators were likely to mail the message to its city of delivery, where another operator retyped it on a telegraph form--both operators then pocketing the difference. On the other hand many of India's top Hindu and Moslem leaders went out of their way to tell Baker that, in or out of jail, they would not be without their weekly copy of TIME.

Like all other exporters TLI has run into trouble with almost predictable regularity in trying to get weekly world-wide distribution of TIME on issue date. Now, after 18 months of trying, TLI has got it, or close to it, in most countries throughout the world. There are exceptions, of course, due to acts of God, man and nature. Subscribers in remote Alaskan villages still have to be served by dog sled, and a subscriber in Andorra, high in the Pyrenees, has told us that during heavy snows his copy arrives by bearer.

One indispensable factor in this world-wide distribution of TIME has been the postwar development of world air transport, which puts the world's major cities within less than 40 flying hours of one of TIME's U.S. and overseas printing plants. In Canada, Latin America and most of Europe and the Near East the mechanics of getting TIME to its readers on schedule are not greatly different than in the U.S. Nor is it too difficult in such far away countries as Australia and New Zealand. Indonesia, however, and India are another matter.

In Indonesia Baker found that there were not only two separate governments at present but also two different currencies, two different codes of export-import regulations, two different exchange control administrations. One thing that both sides agreed on, so far as TIME was concerned, was that they wanted their copies of TIME. The problem of supplying the Dutch and Indonesians living in areas under Dutch administration was simple, requiring only the signing of contracts with the Netherlands East Indies government and with a commercial distributor. Although copies of TIME were already moving across the military perimeter into Indonesian territory (where they sold at $3.50 a copy), arrangements were also made for supplying Indonesian leaders (President Soekarno, his cabinet, etc.) in the interior of Java.

In India, where Baker spent three months and traveled 15,000 miles by air, dockside strikes and irregular mail delivery from TIME's branch printing plant in Cairo had accumulated quantities of unsold newsstand copies of TIME. They were stacked in a warehouse in the Moslem section of Calcutta and TLI's distributor, a Hindu like most Indian businessmen, did not dare try to recover them. Baker located a bearer who was a Christian and helped load the back copies of TIME into a truck himself. Later, the bearer, "a likeable, inoffensive little chap," was kidnapped by a band of Moslems who mistook him for a Hindu and wanted to kill him. He finally convinced them that he was a Roman Catholic by showing his crucifix and answering some questions about the Bible put by a mission-bred Moslem.

Incidents like this, combined with the economic uncertainty that India's impending partition has produced, made it almost impossible to do business there. Nevertheless, Baker eventually managed to straighten out TLI's Indian affairs. In the future, readers in Indonesia and India, like TIME's growing audience of readers elsewhere overseas, will be receiving their copies of TIME within a few days of our distribution date in the U.S.

Cordially,

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