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

TIME'S cover portrait of egg-bald Jap Admiral Nagano and his pistol-pointing battleship stirred up so much interest that I thought you might like to know something about the thinking behind TIME'S covers and how they are planned.

One question subscribers often ask is why TIME'S covers always show people. The answer, of course, is that TIME tells the news that way: in terms of the men and women who are making the news. And so we have been putting the man (or woman) of the week on the cover ever since TIME began. There have been just six exceptions in 1,044 issues--once for the U.S. flag, twice for a Derby race horse, once for a baby basset hound, once for a prize pointer, once for a sea lion.

The symbolic background was an afterthought added about three years ago, when we noticed that nearly half TIME'S cover portraits were people who had broken into the news too recently to be generally recognized (for example, when we put Cuba's strong man Batista on the cover with his army shirt unbuttoned, many readers mistook him for a new baseball star). So back in 1940 we started painting symbols into our covers to help our readers recognize our man of the week more easily and to give them a clue as to why we had chosen him. Perhaps you remember the cover with which this idea really got started--the Christmas cover of the heroic German pastor Martin Niemoller, with the swastika and a Nazi prison camp scene on one side and the Cross and the Nativity on the other.

Sometimes the best clue to the man-of-the-week's identity is a map (like the map of the middle Mediterranean which identified Lord Gort as Governor of Malta). Sometimes it is a flag or a national emblem. Sometimes it is a realistic scene (like the charging tanks behind Britain's General Montgomery) or an allegorical scene (like the Volga running red behind Field Marshal Bock, attacker of Stalingrad). When we put "Hangman" Heydrich on the cover, we planned to put just one noose in the background, but the artist had so much fun drawing its intricacies that he kept right on tying knots until there were ropes enough for 22 executions. And the only reason I can find for the little monkey hanging from a tree behind Java's Governor Ter Poorten was that our artist did not like Japs.

Picture Editor Dana Tasker says admirals are just about the hardest cover subjects -- because oceans and battleships and gold braid look so much alike. Washington figures are also apt to be difficult. For example, how would you go about signalling the news significance of U.S. Economic Dictator James F. Byrnes for flash recognition?

Figuring out these backgrounds--like practically every TIME operation --is a job for group journalism. Editor-in-Chief, Managing Editor, Picture Editor and department head all lend a hand. The research staff often spends hours checking the authenticity of a single detail. And the actual work of painting a TIME cover is so exacting that we need three top-flight artists to keep up with our requirements--Ernest Hamlin Baker, Boris Artzybasheff, and Boris Chaliapin (son of the Metropolitan basso). All these painters have such interesting stories that some week soon I will try to tell you about each of them.

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