A period of considerable anguish occurs regularly around here every Sunday afternoon when the Managing Editor makes up the "back-of-the-book" (all departments from People on, except Business & Finance). At that juncture he has to discard (for reasons of space) a good part of the edited copy in front of him. He has to do it again on Monday for "front-of-the-book's" National Affairs, International, Foreign News, etc.

These discarded stories have been reported, researched, written, edited, and checked for accuracy with the same fidelity as the stories TIME prints. Having lost out in the competition for a place in the average 116 columns (some 50,000 words) of news that TIME runs in each issue, they go to the morgue (together with the research) to await a time when the news brings them forth again.

Sometimes the run of the news relegates them to obscurity. For instance, the Jack Benny cover story was ready for the printer the day the Wehrmacht moved into Poland and World War II began. That was too much competition for Comedian Benny, who was replaced by Poland's Commander in Chief Marshal Smigly-Rydz.-Pearl Harbor, which happened on a Sunday, meant a complete recasting and re-writing of the "front-of-the-book." It also meant the removal of Walt Disney's little elephant Dumbo from the forthcoming Christmas cover. Dumbo was replaced by the sterner visage of General Douglas MacArthur.

This ebb & flow of news also includes stories rejected before being written. The part of TIME which never appears in print is itself a distillation of scores of stories offered, examined, weighed, and found wanting--for any one of a number of reasons. Obviously, since TIME is designed to give its readers the significant news of the week in the fewest possible reading hours, there is a limit to the amount of words readers can be expected to read.* Believed to be dead.

Perhaps as good an example as any of this editorial process is the last issue's National Affairs section. Senior Editor Otto Fuerbringer, his six writers, eight researchers considered some 35 stories at their conference on Thursday at the beginning of TIME'S editorial week. It was not a big week in Washington, and NA was free to look around the country a bit. Some stories went to Business (portal-to-portal) and Sports (its low estate), and NA, which runs an average 14 stories a week, wound up with a schedule of 20 stories.

As the week progressed the schedule changed gradually, as it usually does, under the impact of the news. The Armed Forces merger, announced late Thursday, was added to the schedule.

John Foster Dulles' speech on foreign policy replaced two more general stories on foreign relations. A close examination of the U.S.

Supreme Court hearings in the Lewis coal case disclosed that actually nothing new had been said, and it was dropped.

By Sunday it was obvious that the story on Georgia's gubernatorial confusion, which kept expanding, would need plenty of space for the telling. So several other stories were edited down to make room for it, and others re-written in shorter form. The crash of a Navy plane in California fitted into the story on air safety, and was placed there.

Monday, which can often disrupt a good part of the NA section, was quiet. Editor Fuerbringer came out of makeup with 15 stories in seven pages. Nine of them were successful survivors of the 20-story Thursday schedule -- although some of them had changed in character as the news changed. The others were the survivors of the eleven additional stories that had arisen during the week. All in all, it added up to an average news week for National Affairs.

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