To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

We gave our printer a pretty tough time on this week's cover.

When it first went to press the big news was the Japanese defeat in the Solomons, so we planned a big story analyzing the American position in the South Pacific and put the Prime Minister of Australia on the cover.

By mid-week the Solomons had dropped off the front page; the big news was a Republican come-back greater than even G.O.P. stalwarts had hoped; so we scrapped the Australian covers that were printed and substituted a painting of Republican Tom Dewey.

But by Friday Dewey was half forgotten as the full magnitude of the Anglo-American victory in Egypt was revealed. So 800,000 Dewey covers followed the Australian to the old paper mill; and we ordered a new set of covers on double time--picturing Admiral Harwood, the British Naval Commander at Alexandria.

And then Saturday came the long-awaited American landing in Africa. General Eisenhower became the man of the week, and a distracted printer had to start our 1,300,000 cover run all over again with the Eisenhower painting we had prepared weeks ago for just this break.

I think this is pretty nearly the most hectic week we have had yet on our covers, but these days particularly we have to be prepared for just such kaleidoscopic changes in the news; and so one of the biggest continuing jobs our picture department has to meet is to be sure we are never caught short without the right cover ready to put on the press at an hour's notice after a big break in the news--whatever it may be or whenever it may come, in Norway or Dakar, in Tunis or Guadalcanal.

Painting a TIME cover is a good week's work for one of our artists; the four-color engravings take five to six days more; making press plates takes another day. So having a cover ready to start printing at an hour's notice means not only sighting ahead of the news to have the painting and engraving done in advance; it means having 32 finished printing plates actually standing near the press (32 to print 8 covers at once in four colors).

Right now we have 52 such covers all electrotyped "8 up." Half of them will have to be melted down unused, of course. For example, last month you saw Lord Gort on TIME'S cover as Governor of Malta. Gort's portrait was first done many weeks ago when he was Governor of Gibraltar--and when he was transferred a thousand miles East we had to do an entirely new Gort painting with a Maltese background. And then we also had to get the new Commander into a Gibraltar background. The result was 64 new press plates--and this may give you some idea why we keep four crack cover artists pretty busy working up covers for us just in case.

I suppose we could save ourselves a lot of headaches by adopting an easier formula for our covers; but one of the things that sets TIME apart is that TIME always tells the news as the story of the people who make the news, tries never to forget that news without people is not only dry but basically false. The cover portrait of the man of the week against the symbolic background of the news of the week is so precisely keyed to this TIME tradition that I hope we will never have to change it--even if sometimes, as this week, it means scrapping thousands and thousands of covers not once but three times over.

Cordially

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.