Tage Bolander, Paris manager for TIME-LIFE International, publishers of our overseas editions, turned up in New York City a fortnight ago with an encouraging report of the state of TLI's operations in Western Europe. Said he, in part:

"The last year has made a big difference to TIME Inc.'s European publishing operation and, although there are many factors involved in it like Marshall Plan aid, the fact is that European governments themselves are now convinced that we are in the international publishing business to stay, and that TLI is not just another temporary postwar project. Furthermore, they want the American story and, despite their shortage of foreign exchange, are doing their best to make it available to their citizens via TIME, LIFE, and other American publications. Apparently, our readers feel the same way about us because our circulation continues to rise (against the prevailing trend in Western Europe) and our subscribers are renewing at a rate unusually high for us or any other publication."

Swedish-born Tage Bolander, who spends much of his time traveling about Europe on TLI business, is concerned, of course, with TIME's Atlantic edition, printed in Paris for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. As you may recall from my February 28th Letter, Atlantic is one of TIME's four International editions whose 260,000 weekly copies go to a million readers in 180 countries and possessions overseas. Each carries advertising directed to its particular markets.

TIME Atlantic is now three years old, but it has a prior history. Before the war a modest number of copies of our U.S. editions went by surface mail to various European heads of state, their ministers, U.S. embassies, and private citizens abroad who wanted the American viewpoint on the news of the world and news of America. When war closed most of the Continent to us, we continued to supply available subscribers by ship as best we could through the German blockade, and managed to fly a light-weight edition from New York to people like Winston Churchill and his Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, who wanted TIME each week in a hurry.

In different ways and places TIME filtered through to the Continent. Clandestine underground publications kept Occupied France supplied with TIME material which arrived via Portugal. By 1944 we were printing a Scandinavian edition behind the German blockade in neutral Stockholm from film (of TIME's pages) flown from the U.S. to Britain and then, by blacked-out Mosquito bomber, across the North Sea at night into Sweden. There German officers passing through could read about Allied victories, and the Japanese embassy dutifully cabled TIME's entire contents to Tokyo each week. We never lost a packet of film through enemy action.

By that time, too, we were printing various editions of TIME for our own forces overseas in Teheran, Cairo and, eventually, Rome and Paris. After V-J day, when TIME Inc. decided to continue its world-wide publishing operation that had been built up from wartime necessity, we consolidated all of these far-flung printing operations in Paris in the Atlantic edition, so that Europeans could read their copies of TIME while U.S. citizens were reading the same issue. The film developed during the war, now flown from the U.S. to Paris, makes this fast printing schedule possible.

Today 70,000 weekly copies of the Atlantic edition are read from Norway and Iceland to the Cape of Good Hope. Their readers include such oldtimers as Churchill, Cartoonist David Low, English Press Lord Beaverbrook, Artist Pablo Picasso, the Crown Prince of Sweden, Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts, French Diplomat Georges Bidault, a Walter Kramer of Zululand, South Africa, and a host of others who want TIME enough to pay the rate (up to $15) we have to charge for a year's subscription.

To get TIME Atlantic to them on time has been a three-year struggle with dollar shortages, transportation difficulties, censorship, bans, import restrictions, and a host of other problems. At present, for instance, there is no direct air route from Paris to Berlin. Therefore, the fastest way to supply the Berlin newsstands is by commercial airline over the Berlin airlift. Israel also gets its 1,000 weekly copies by air.

Through all this TLI has also learned -- the hard way -- that the war of ideas is a real war. As one European country after another has gone behind the Iron Curtain, TLI has had to stop supplying our readers there with TIME Atlantic -- except for a few copies to U.S. embassies, U.S. Information Service libraries, and some local "safe" political addresses. The last, of course, was Czechoslovakia, where TIME was banned 24 hours after last spring's Communist coup. Knowing that henceforth anybody receiving TIME would be politically suspect, TLI stopped all subscription copies, including the late President Eduard Benes'. Eighteen subscription copies now go to Czechoslovakians who can politically afford to get them.

At present TIME Atlantic is excluded from the newsstands in Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Portugal, Trieste and, of course, the Soviet Union.

A measure of TIME Atlantic's acceptance as a part of the Western European publishing world was indicated not long ago when the Paris printers went on strike. We made emergency arrangements to have that week's issue for all of our European subscribers printed in England. To our surprise and gratification, the English printers received a communication from our Paris printers asking them to go ahead and print the issue because TIME was a good French export product and ought not to be kept from publication by France's internal problems.

Soon I hope to tell you about TIME's third International edition, the Pacific, which is printed in Honolulu and Tokyo for the Far East and Pacific areas.

Cordially yours,

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