As a postscript to his story on Sweden's "Well-Stocked Cellar" in our Dec. 31 issue, TIME Senior Editor Henry Anatole Grunwald sent a letter describing a reindeer sleigh ride in the wilds of Lapland. I thought you would be interested in reading part of it, because it is indicative of the far corners to which some of our editors penetrate when they take trips away from home.

"I undertook the ride not purely in the spirit of adventure," Grunwald wrote with lavish understatement, "but because it offered the only means of transportation to a reindeer roundup that I wanted very much to see. For the first few minutes, a friendly Lapp sat beside me on the precarious vehicle, not improved in design since the stone age, and all was well. But then the caravan stopped for an instant, the Lapp got up, handed me the crude reins, grinned encouragingly, and was gone. There I crouched, staring at the jiggling rump of the reindeer, going like crazy across the virtually trackless forests, over ditches, tree stumps and fences. By the time the day was over, I had fallen off only once and had learned to speak the reindeer language fluently; this consists chiefly of the word brrrr shouted at the animal. It is supposed to slow the beast down. Apparently my accent was wrong; the reindeer kept going faster & faster.

"The roundup itself took place in an enclosure in the midst of a thick forest. The reindeer run around in frightened herds and the Lapps walk among them, trying not to get trampled and swinging their lassos . . . The most important thing at the roundup is jaloviina, which is a mixture of brandy and alcohol distilled from wood. But the Lapps also like foreign firewaters. I just happened to have with me a bottle of Scotch. My interpreter foolishly mentioned this fact, and we were presently informed that it would be a nice gesture if we offered a drink to the Lapp chieftain. The chieftain, of course, had to pass it along to some sub-chieftains and the stuff was gone before you could say jaloviina ... It is wonderful to be out in the field after so many years of peering at the world from behind a desk and through someone else's eyes."

Last month the National Writers Club had a how-to-write-a-book exhibit at their Denver headquarters. Denverite William Barrett, who has never been to China, but whose novel about China, The Left Hand of God, stayed on 1951 bestseller lists for nine months, explained some of the research techniques he used. When he starts a book, says Barrett : "I give all my characters a birthday and a birthplace. I set the birthday arbitrarily and then take down a volume of TIME and read through the magazines for that month to find out what was happening then, what his parents were worrying about. I've got a bound set of TIME, all except the first four volumes, and use it all the time. I also put an emphasis on the twelfth birthday. If I know who won the World Series, or what happened at the Indianapolis Speedway, then I might get a clue to what my imaginary person was thinking about at that crucial time.

"In The Left Hand, I have a Dr. Sigman who went to China in 1947 to do research on tropical diseases. To find out what diseases he might have been interested in, I went through the TIME Medicine section and took notes on the tropical and Asiatic diseases mentioned."

The road to fame, one of you writes, can be paved with letters published in TIME.

He is Lewis Williams, 39, a Philadelphian who has had seven of his letters published,* all since Nov. 27, 1950, although he first started writing us three years ago. His most recent nominated "a once stalwart gent known as Dollar Bill" to be runner-up to the Man of the Year. Another of his letters, suggesting that a local Airedale was "a perfect Hollywood glamour girl," brought "comments by the dozens and dozens," he told us. "The rector called me on the phone to give his blessing; a man stopped me on the trolley to say how much he liked the . . . letter, and a friend told me she enjoys reading 'my stuff in TIME.' "

Cordially yours

*By no means a record. Another reader (a pro named Upton Sinclair), for instance, has had 18 letters published in TIME, starting with the Nov. 10, 1924 issue.

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