A Letter From The Publisher, Jan. 26, 1948

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Scores of you have been having another field day lately spotting oddities in TIME. This time it may have been touched off by the picture the editors ran in the Sept. 22 issue of England's Prime Minister Clement Attlee wearing his hat backwards, which drew a heavy response, much of it accompanied by the inevitable question: "Is he coming or going?" At any rate, when Czechoslovakia's Jan Masaryk turned up in the Oct. 6 issue wearing his spectacles upside down, more than 100 of you said you noticed it. Fifteen of you, presumably equipped with magnifying glasses, even noticed that there were 56 stars in a floral facsimile of the American flag made by a Mexican florist.

This interested, critical, piecemeal inspection of TIME extends to all departments of the magazine. Some of it, of course, is concerned with the inevitable errors that occur. All of it, however, shows an intensity of readership that is gratifying and, often, astonishing.

For instance, some time ago a number of you noticed an interesting discrepancy in one issue. On page 31 we ran an advertisement of a pharmaceutical manufacturer calling attention—in small type—to "a diphtheria increase of more than 18 percent during the past year." On page 56 our Medicine department had a story which said that there had been "an approximate 30% rise in cases (of diphtheria) last year." TIME got its figures from the United States Public Health Service; the ad's figure erred only in being very conservative. But the fact remained that readers had to read the Medicine story and the advertisement in order to ask us about the discrepancy.

Sometimes the juxtaposition of advertising and editorial material causes you to ask: "Did you plan it that way?" The question was raised recently by a number of readers when a picture of the 30th Anniversary Parade in Moscow (showing huge blown-up portraits of Russian leaders being carried above the marchers' heads) appeared opposite a full-page ad built around a picture of the big gasbag figures in Macy's famous Thanksgiving Day parade. We didn't, of course, plan it that way.

Another coincidence was spotted by a number of you in the November 3 issue. An advertisement on page 101 showed a parsimonious individual tucking a penny away in his vault while, behind his back, a hand reaching through the window grabbed a stack of banknotes from a table. "While you're busy saving pennies you're losing dollars," read the ad. On page 14 the Miscellany department carried the following item: "In Detroit, Theater Cashier Doris Trask dropped a penny, stooped to pick it up, straightened to discover that somebody had reached in her cage, snatched $200."

This evidence of the close attention you devote to our advertising as well as our editorial columns was very well exemplified by the 137 of you who wrote in to tell us that a Biblical quotation in an ad for the motion picture, The Best Years Of Our Lives, had been incorrectly ascribed to the Old Testament. It had been taken from the New Testament.