Dear TIME-Reader:

OVER lunch recently, a statistician in our promotion department numbered sugar cubes from one to seven, then shuffled them around. He estimated that the chance of correctly listing the new order of the numbered cubes would be roughly 1 in 5,000. By last week he would have had no trouble at all convincing the advertising specialists who competed in the fifth TIME Circulation Letter Sweepstakes.

Of some 4,200 highly skilled contestants, not one was able to rank the pulling power of seven circulation letters mailed to potential subscribers during a five-week test period.

The Circulation Letter Sweepstakes was dreamed up by our promotion department about 15 years ago. Participation is confined to our friends in the advertising field throughout the U.S., and their response has been so enthusiastic that we have been staging the sweeps every once in a while ever since, mostly during the summer doldrums. This time we asked these pros to prejudge the response to seven letters, each making a different appeal to the same number and kind of prospects during the test period. Advertising Director John McLatchie wrote them: "It's a chance to pit your advertising judgment against those supreme judges of anyone's advertising --the customers themselves." Though there was actually no first-place winner this summer, the sweeps seemed to generate so much excitement in the advertising world that we decided to upgrade the leaders one place.

As a result, the first prize of $1,000 worth of goods or services advertised in TIME went to Bernard M. Lewy of New York, who had listed the first five of the seven letters correctly; In sweltering Manhattan, he began to think in terms of air conditioning for his office and home. One of the three contestants awarded the second prize of $500 worth of goods or services was Frank Keefe, also of New York, who had his wife, son and daughter checking a list of 737 TIME advertisers.

Twenty third-place winners busily chose the $100 worth of golf clubs, cameras, electric fans or half a dozen other items. Jay Y. Tipton of Salt Lake City wrote: "It isn't easy to choose . . . I've been toying with the idea of asking for $100 worth of Oldsmobiles, or some of I. W. Harper's liquid assets; there are so many products and services in TIME'S advertising pages." In Atlanta, Jack F. Glenn waited for his wife to come back to town.

He wrote: "In that she is an ardent reader of TIME, I feel sure that she is going to want to have a part in selecting the $100 worth of prize." In Omaha, George M. McCulloch probably expressed the feelings of winners and losers alike after playing what turned out to be promotion's rough 5,000-to-1 shot. He wrote: "Brother!"

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