At 9 o'clock last Tuesday night, while most of you gathered around your radios and television sets, a large part of TIME'S editorial staff came in to start work on the story of the 1952 election. Through the night they compiled and analyzed election returns, studied special reports from correspondents stationed at key listening posts around the country. By the time the last returns were being compiled, the editors were sending their final corrections to the printers.

Racing a midday Wednesday deadline, TIME'S election story went out on teletypesetters to printing plants in Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles, where printing and production crews took over, 36 hours later than usual. Meanwhile, exact copies of each page were put on film and acetate page proofs and hustled aboard waiting planes for shipment to TIME'S overseas printing plants.

At Philadelphia, a small Cessna plane stood by to carry the pages to Idlewild Airport, where they were put aboard a flight scheduled to arrive in Paris early Thursday afternoon. Other page proofs were flown from Los Angeles to Honolulu and Tokyo, and from Idlewild to Miami, to be transferred to a chartered Pan American flight for Cuba. Stories were also cabled directly from the U.S. to Paris and Tokyo, as a safeguard against delays in air traffic. Buried in the mass of detail these arrangements involved, TIME Production Chief Bert Chapman confessed: "At a time like this, I carry my files in my head."

The schedule called for having all copies of TIME'S U.S. edition printed and bound by 8 a.m. Thursday. Wherever planes were available, they were used to carry copies to population centers farthest from the printing plants--to Texas, Florida, Washington, Maine. One American Airlines plane was scheduled to carry 6,700 copies of TIME to Buffalo on a regular flight just after midnight Wednesday; another was chartered to carry 36,000 copies to Dallas, where they would be redistributed by air express to other Texas cities. Because this issue of TIME--136 pages--is one of the largest ever published, planes had to cut down on the number of copies they could haul.

Trucks went out from printing plants to nearby locations--New York City, Washington, Boston, St. Louis--and the last copies off the presses went on sale in cities where they were printed. Wherever possible, subscriber copies were shipped to post offices near their destination before being placed in the mail.

In thousands of outpost settlements around the world, as well as in the big cities and mainline towns, TIME'S traffic department made every effort to get copies out on schedule--or, at worst, not more than 24 hours late. In some cases, this wasn't possible. In Honolulu, for instance, the late printing meant missing a regular flight to Wake Island.

But long advance planning was getting TIME out this week in most remote places, such as the newsstand at Ben's Provision Store at Stephenville, Newfoundland (pop. 6,083), which was scheduled to receive its usual 20 copies via Trans-Canada Air Lines at 9:10 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 7. In the town of Stephenville, Ben reports, and among the U.S. troops stationed at the nearby Ernest Harmon Air Force Base (many of whose personnel are. subscribers to TIME and whose post exchange gets another 100 copies), the U.S. election has been the biggest topic of conversation for weeks. From advance indications, every copy of TIME'S election issue will be grabbed up before the day is over.

Cordially yours,

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