A Letter From the Publisher: Mar. 2, 1987

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Staffers at TIME learn to live with the necessary but often confining space constraints of journalism. Quite a number of them, however, have found an antidote for the weekly squeeze: writing books. "I enjoy the long haul of a book," says TIME Art Critic Robert Hughes, author of the best-selling The Fatal Shore (Knopf), a 688-page history of his native Australia's years as a British penal colony. "Books give you a greater sense of proprietorship," says Senior Writer Otto Friedrich, whose ninth work, City of Nets (Harper & Row), details the Hollywood of the 1940s. "They are something that you can call your own."

Finding the time to write is a problem. Hughes spent ten years on The Fatal Shore. "It was a constant tap dance between the magazine and the book," says he. Friedrich worked weekends for four years to finish City of Nets. Senior Editor Walter Isaacson labored late at night and during weeks off on The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (Simon & Schuster), a chronicle of the U.S. foreign policy establishment co-with former Associate Editor Evan Thomas. "Even so," says Isaacson, "it took three years."

To work around his schedule at TIME, Associate Editor J.D. Reed and his wife Christine divided chores on Exposure (Soho Press), a murder mystery set in the world of soccer. Christine wrote, while her husband edited and supplied sports expertise. Says he: "I also provided lots of pats on the back, and coffee."

Some of our correspondents found subjects for books simply by plying their trade. Before leaving Tokyo for his new post in Los Angeles, Correspondent Edwin Reingold collaborated with his subject for Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony (Dutton), a study of that enterprising industrialist. Boston Correspondent Lawrence Malkin's The National Debt (Henry Holt) grew out of his 25 years as an economics journalist. Washington Bureau Chief Strobe Talbott expanded on his coverage of the past two superpower summits to co-write, with Michael Mandelbaum of the Council on Foreign Relations, Reagan and Gorbachev (Random House).

Our authors proved to be adept jugglers. Robert Slater of the Jerusalem bureau wrote The Titans of Takeover (Prentice-Hall), a look at Wall Street machinations, while reporting on the Middle East. Ottawa Bureau Chief Peter Stoler, who probes the beleaguered media in The War Against the Press (Dodd, Mead), completed his book while covering Canada. Says Stoler: "I learned to grab bits of time on planes and trains, grateful that it takes a while to get from one end of Canada to another."