Fall 1949
This is the way this letter might look (after it had been fished out of the wastebasket and somewhat smoothed) if I had sent it to Andrei Vishinsky or Maurice Thores or Ana Pauker.
For this is an invitation to subscribe to TIME and Communists have as little respect for honest journalism as they have opportunity to read it.
Here in America, on the other hand where we still have the precious right to read what we choose a wealth of magazines, newspapers, periodicals and books is available to anyone who wants them. So TIME is only one of the ways Americans have of keeping well-informed. But many Americans consider it the best one.
They include businessmen (more than half of all the officers and directors in Poor’s Register) — government officials(half of all the key people in Washington — doctors (more than 40% of all the members of the American Medical Assn.) — lawyers, churchmen, college presidents, newspaper editors and more than 1,500,000 busy, intelligent families like yours coast to coast.
For people like these, TIME performs an essential service: It gathers the entertaining and the informative news from everywhere, week by marching week organizes it into 21 logical departments from Art to Theater tells it as one story of history-in-the-making so brief you can read it in a single evening, so clear you will grasp its significance at once, so vivid you will remember it long after you have read it.
This is the essential service TIME will perform for you— and today I can invite you to hire this service for the next 44 weeks at a special introductory rate of only $3.57 saving you $5.23 under the single copy price, $1.51 under the $5.08 these copies would cost you at the regular subscription price!
The enclosed airmail order card needs no stamp. Just sign it, send no money, mail it today and we will bill you later!
Cordially,
F.D. Pratt
Circulation Director
This is the “Crumple” letter from 1949, crumpled up to look as if it had been retrieved from a wastebasket. Frank Johnson said, “I might have something to do with that.”
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