LAST week TIME Inc. acquired a 77-year-old textbook publishing firm, the Silver Burdett Co.. and this provides a suitable occasion to tell our readers something about our expanding venture into book publishing.

Silver Burdett has deep roots in American education, providing textbooks, mostly for elementary schools, in music, arithmetic, spelling, geography and history. Its texts are in use in all 50 states and in 113 countries, and it has published books in such languages as Bengali. Urdu. Thai. and. for the past 60 years in the Philippines, in Tagalog. Last year its sales totaled $7,500,000. As a subsidiary of TIME Inc.. it will continue to operate with its present management and staff in Morristown X.J.. but will now be able to make use of our corporate resources, including our reference library of 50,000 books, and 6,000,000 photographs and drawings.

TIME Inc. is happy to be associated with so well-established a textbook firm, and hopes that together we can make an increasingly effective contribution to American education. This is only one part of our expanding book publishing. Only last year, after publishing a number of individual books. TIME Inc. established its own book division, with Jerome Hardy as publisher and Norman Ross as editor. In 1961 the new division published 13 titles and sold 3,400,000 copies, including the LIFE Pictorial Atlas and LIFE'S World and Nature libraries series. The division's most ambitious future project is a six-volume history of the U.S.

We on TIME are now busy helping to launch a soft-cover book club called the TIME Reading Program, with Max Gissen as editor.

Every other month we will send out to subscribers (80,000 of whom have signed up so far) three or four books picked by the editors for their contemporary relevance, their readability and their quality.

The first four now being mailed out indicate the kind of choice we have made: The American Character, by D. W. Brogan; The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene; Reveille in Washington, by Margaret Leech, and The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert L. Heilbroner. In addition to a positioning preface by the editors of TIME, often as not we hope to incorporate a specially written introduction by a critic or authority in the field, or by the author himself.

For example, here is Graham Greene, introducing the book that "gives me more satisfaction than any I have written":

The Power and the Glory was born of a journey to Mexico in the winter of 1937-38 undertaken for quite other motives than a novel.

It was not a very happy journey, clouded politically because England was about to break off diplomatic relations with Mexico and personally because a rather odd libel action had been brought against me by Miss Shirley Temple, the child film star. When I returned from the south to Mexico City with an attack of dysentery, I found a letter from my publisher . . . the Lord Chief Justice had taken a severe view of the case and there was some danger that I might be arrested on my return. But by the time I had received my mail I had taken such a distaste to Mexico that even an English prison promised relief ...

Even in an introduction. Greene seems compulsively readable--which is the way we hope our entire soft-cover book program will turn out to be.

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