If you are a typical TIME-reading man* you spend 7 1/2 minutes a day shaving, using a statistical 78.8 strokes. You usually have about $30.50 in your pocket. You carry six keys, and use all but one of them.

You own four business suits, a suit of dinner clothes, two summer suits, two sport jackets, an overcoat, topcoat and raincoat--and you picked them out yourself; your wife seldom if ever shops for your clothes with you. You also own 21 shirts, six pairs of shoes, three hats and 31 ties (but you like only 13 of them). You prefer four-in-hands 10 to 1 over bows.

You bought your present car new and have driven it about 34,859 miles. You own stocks and bonds worth $20,158.

You're active in church work and affairs connected with your fraternal organization, but you still find time (40.8 days a year) for your favorite hobby. Reading is tops--closely followed by fishing, gardening, photography. Your usual golf score is around 95. (You had 12 golfballs at the beginning of 1947, and during the year you bought 13, found six, acquired nine by "other means." By the beginning of 1948 you had lost eleven, demolished seven, given away six.)

Someone in your family plays a musical instrument (the odds are it's the piano, but it could be the violin, clarinet or saxophone). You entertain eleven guests a week for dinner, lunch, bridge or the weekend, and you figure it costs you nearly a thousand dollars a year to do so.

Asked about some of the people in the news you would like to meet, you put Secretary Marshall and Joseph Stalin at the head of the list, say you would rather meet Douglas MacArthur than John L. Lewis, Bob Hope than Walter Winchell, Mme. Chiang Kai-shek than either Eleanor Roosevelt or Margaret Truman.

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In case you're curious about how we happen to know these things, here's the answer:

Every few years we go to a large number of TIME-subscribing families and ask you, please, to "sit for your portraits." We made one such survey in 1943 -- but we know there have been a lot of changes since then. For example, the average TIME reader today is a little younger than the average TIME reader of five years ago (this is mostly because a lot of veterans are now reading TIME; men who got to know and like TIME overseas). And of course the average income of the TIME reader has gone up (today it is over $7,600 a year -- more than double the national average).

Until this week, however, we didn't have nearly enough of these new facts to give us a true-to-life portrait of the more than three million people who are reading TIME today. But now we have taken another look at you -- by sending a cross-section of you a nine-page questionnaire. Because we were trying to get an over-all picture of TIME'S 1,800,000 men and 1,500,000 women readers from this large cross-section survey, we called our questionnaire About Your TIME Exposure, and the last question asked, "How about enclosing a snapshot of yourself, hmm?"

Judging by the replies, you're a pretty attractive group. But see for yourself: The pictures illustrating this letter show just a few of the more than 400 TIME readers who took us at our word, sent us a snapshot. We were very pleased to get them.

Cordially,

*A report on the typical TIME-reading woman will be ready soon.

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