Dear Time-Reader

Fortunately for us, the 50 different kinds of Who's Who reposing in TIME Inc.'s morgue (i.e., "library of essential information") are a constant and reliable journalistic source of biographical facts--and a bulwark against the uproar occasioned when we misspell somebody's name. These are only a fragment, however, of the 29,000 reference books I find we now have in the morgue* for the convenience of TIME'S editors, who call for them at the rate of about 500 a week--plus an average 40 or 50 that have to be obtained from local libraries.

From The ABC of Atoms to Zuni Indians, this catalogue of information required by our editors is mainly historical, biographical, economic and statistical.

There are, for instance, 3,150 books on various aspects of European, Asiatic and African history, 900 volumes on labor, 2,900 on economics, 450 on medicine, some children's books (Mother Goose, Alice In Wonderland, etc.), and 14 cook books of English, French, German, Chinese and Armenian recipes. They are useful, among other things, for satisfying our editors' curiosity about such matters as these (taken from a recent week's morgue queries):

What was the first comic strip?

What is the gestation period of a cow? Did William Jennings Bryan call a prayer meeting during a Democratic National Convention?

How many saints are there? What are the names of some flowers that make noises while they grow? What is the cost of a U.S. battleship? How many people died in the St. Bartholomew massacre?*

Because the morgue has no intention of competing with the public library, it weeds out books as their value diminishes or is gone for our purposes, making way for about 250 new volumes each month.

One recent week's purchases ranged from selected orations of Cicero through a history of American arbitration, a treatise on the structure of postwar prices, the official U.S. Army and Air Force register, to an account of the jurisdictional disputes in the motion picture industry.

What books the morgue doesn't buy are apparently made up for by the members of TIME Inc. who, according to our Book Service Department, bought better than 6,000 books last year for their own use. As of last week, BSD reports, TIME'S bestseller list is headed by the following four books: Churchill's Memoirs, The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh, The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer.

Cordially yours, James A. Linen

* In addition to some 450,000 indexed folders of biographical, historical, business and otherwise usefully classified information. * The answers, in order: 1) Yellow Kid by Richard Outcoult, in the New York World; 2) 280 days; 3) Yes. At the 1924 convention in New York City; 4) Not even the wisest hagiologist knows; 5) lotus blossoms, phlox pods, the squirting cucumber of southern Europe; 6) average cost of a Class 6 battleship: $92,122,100; 7) an estimated 50,000.

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