A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

In response to a query as to whether our overseas readers would like a dictionary of the American slang appearing in TIME, Reader J. H. Bassett of Mitcham, Surrey, England, wrote us:

"We like your spicy lingo, and I reckon that regulars figure out the initialese (G.O.P., EGA, etc.). It's fairly easy now to follow Big John with his sidekicks in a souped-up Caddy to the hot-stove-league ball game at the jampacked Rose Bowl . . . I could creep into a flophouse, speakeasy, hot-spot or crap-joint with a pretty clear idea of what I'd be in there for. And although I admit that there are times when I could cheerfully hospitalize your typewriter-pecking hoodlums with a double whammy from Fowler's English Usage, I don't really have much cause to dicker. You've got a dead eye for an angle and stone the crows* if we don't get our one-and-a-tanner's worth./-

"But for the record, oldtimer, what the Sam Hill is a Fifth Avenue ziggurat?"**

About a year ago a university undergraduate from one of the Iron Curtain countries wrote us that his gift subscription to TIME was running out and that, under the present currency restrictions, he had no way of paying our renewal rate. Would we trust him to pay when he could?

If our reader was willing to risk the consequences of receiving a banned American magazine through the mails, we were certainly willing to go along with him. We continued his TIME subscription and also sent him LIFE. Recently, we heard from him again. He wrote, in part:

"Some months ago the last English newspapers and magazines disappeared from our shops, and now only TIME and LIFE arrive as the last documents of the existence of the magnificent outside world. You can't imagine what a terrible feeling it is to be hermetically closed in . . . Your magazines are not only for me but for a great circle of my acquaintances our only source of information and the only spiritual consolation and help we have in our daily unpleasant and hard life.

". . . We pray for the prolongation of these subscriptions, hoping that in the nearer or farther future we shall be able to pay for them. We can't imagine our life without this 'golden thread' which for us is the reading of TIME and LIFE . . ."

And we can't imagine turning down a request like this. The subscriptions have been extended for another year.

New birds keep turning up here at the TIME & LIFE Building in the wake of our book, Strictly for the Birds, which I told you about recently. The business of miscalling our feathered friends has now been advanced, or retarded, by such additions to the aviary as the Blue Funk, the Lesser Evil, the Involuntary Flinch and, heaven protect us, the Working Gull. There have been many requests for additional copies of the bird book, and we are fulfilling them as long as the supply lasts.

We have long known about the multiple readership of copies of TIME, and the following communication from Pacific Edition Subscriber Clifford Kruse in Papeete, Tahiti, helps confirm it:

"I thought you might be interested to know just what happens to each copy of TIME that reaches me. After I read TIME (and I demand preference, seeing as how I pay for it) some four or five other Americans devour it here, after which I send it by copra steamer to M. LeBrunnec, a lonely Frenchman at Taa Huka, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands, some 800 miles northeast. LeBrunnec returns it to me and I send it on to Toni Kline, an American hermit on Tubuai in the Australes, 400 miles south. When he sends it back by trading vessel, I dispatch it to the priest at Mangareva in the Gambier group, 1,000 miles east of here. In return for letting them read TIME, these folk keep me supplied with bananas, taro and gossip. I think they're getting the best of the deal."

Cordially yours,

* Gorblimey. /- One shilling and six pence. ** As used in the January 23 issue, a modern Manhattan baby skyscraper that is remindful of the Babylonian ziggurat: a lofty, pyramidal temple tower built in successive stages, with a shrine on top.

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