A Letter From The Publisher, Aug. 5, 1946

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If you wanted to start a newsmagazine (or newspaper) there is one indispensable publisher's item you would be unable to buy—a morgue.

Morgue is journalese for "library of essential information." It is not a commercial product ; it has to be created. TIME'S morgue has been 23 years abuilding. Now presided over by 55 librarians and helpers, it contains some 400,000 indexed folders of biographical, historical, business, and otherwise usefully classified information, 25,000 reference books, and 400 up-to-date periodicals. Needless to say, we would be lost without it.

When TIME began in 1923, it had no morgue. We had an unabridged dictionary, the college "libraries" of some of our editors, a copy of Who's Who, and bound copies of a local newspaper (which went back 20 years but were of no use because they weren't indexed). Somebody contributed an encyclopedia, and the Public Library was close by. On closing nights the staff carted the usable part of the morgue by subway to the printer's and checked late copy while the issue went to press. As late as 1929 an office boy with a dolly could move it in half an hour—and sometimes did.

This year it took professional movers a full week, working every night, to shift the morgue to new and larger quarters. Their cargo had been—and still is—separated into four major categories: 1) books (standard reference works and pamphlets on all phases of world doings); 2) periodicals (the most important U.S. and foreign magazines and trade journals); 3) subject file (general material on everything from Absinthe to Zoos); 4) biographical file (information on well known peopie, living or dead, from AE, Irish Poet George William Russell's pseudonym, to Zworykin, Vladimir K., Russian-born U.S. physicist).

With this breakdown the morgue's 16 research librarians, each of whom is a specialist in a specific field (Foreign News, National Affairs, etc.), can fill a TIME writer's request for background material, or check a fact, in a hurry. They get about 5,000 requests a month. For a recent issue of TIME they were asked to determine (among other things): the wage rates of natives in the Solomon Islands; the form of poetry most similar to the rhumba rhythm; major U.S. cities controlled by Republican mayors; the number of U.S. synthetic rubber plants that have closed down; how many Methodists there are in Europe ; the Moslem stand on birth control.

Finding this raw material quickly and completely demands patience, imagination and a real knowledge of the resources of the morgue each librarian is responsible for. Their work, however, would be painfully handicapped if the morgue were left to sprout at will. To keep it vigorous, its files have to be constantly pruned of dead material. For example, although some 600 new names are added to the biography file every month, an equal number of folders whose subjects are no longer of news interest are weeded out — illustrative, perhaps, of a journalistic axiom that it takes a very staunch, or lucky, citizen (in politics, cinema, or elsewhere) to remain newsworthy for a decade.