A Letter From The Publisher, Feb. 11, 1946

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Not long after V-J Day, when the paper shortage had eased up a bit for the first time in four years, we were able to put a lot more copies of TIME on U.S. newsstands. A phenomenon, which had been gathering momentum for some time, then suddenly became apparent: the demand for TIME on the newsstands had grown to four times what it was before the war. Then, it was 120,000a week. Now, sales have reached half a million and TIME is still selling out.

Quite naturally, this startling increase made us want to find out why so many more of you were buying newsstand copies of TIME and, if possible, who you were. War's end and redeployment, of course, had brought a great many readers of our overseas editions home from the battlefronts, and so we thought that perhaps returned veterans were largely responsible for the increase. We decided to research the question. Louisville, Ky. was chosen as the test city, and the independent research firm of Elmo Roper went to work for us there, assigning interviewers to question TIME buyers at newsstands all over town.

When the returns were in, we found that we were only partly right about the newly returned veterans. Three in ten of our Louisville newsstand TIME buyers were veterans, all right, but seven in ten were Louisville civilians. In other words, three times as many home-fronters had taken to buying TIME on the newsstands as before the war.

But the presence of so many veterans among these civilian newsstand buyers made the

entire Louisville group average slightly younger than TIME subscribers, with smaller incomes (armed forces pay) and more education (younger people these days are more educated than older people). Most (68%) of the group of civilians and veterans were males in the salaried minor executive class, and a majority (69%) were married. Interestingly enough, more than a third were former TIME subscribers. They gave two main reasons for choosing to buy their copies of TIME at a newsstand: 1) it was more convenient and 2) they were not at present permanently located.

Our own returned servicemen here at TIME were not surprised at how many veterans were buying TIME on the newsstands. Having read TIME—and seen their friends queue up for copies —on all sorts of warfronts during the last four years, they had predicted that quite a percentage of our postwar newsstand buyers would prove to be servicemen who had got the habit of reading TIME abroad.

We were particularly interested in these newsstand buyers from the services because this was our first good chance to find out just what kind of men read TIME'S overseas editions. For many years this part of TIME'S circulation had not been measurable because the armed forces would not permit civilian questionnaires. Now, we have the following picture of these Louisville veteran readers:

The majority (53.2%) are in their thirties, are married (63.8%), are in the professional-executive class, and have been to college (57.5%). They have about the same TIME newsstand-buying habits as Louisville civilians : two-thirds