Dear Time-Reader

Artist Boris Artzybasheff's cover drawing for this week's issue of TIME marks the first appearance of the space robot of tomorrow on TIME'S cover. But in the past, TIME has devoted a number of covers (26 in all) to other newsworthy personalities outside the human fold.

Animals seem to have been favored in TIME'S early years. The first was a baby basset hound (Feb. 27, 1928). Said the story: "In the ringed and shadowy eyes of animals, more clearly than in the secretive countenance of man, is expressed the mystery, the dark sorrow of existence. Of all beasts, dogs are perhaps the most melancholy in their looks; of all dogs, the slouching basset hound is the most sad. Of all basset hounds, none is more woebegone, more tragic than a certain basset hound puppy. Last week he sat nuzzling his weak chin into the loose bib of flesh which an arbitrary heredity has draped around his neck."

On TIME'S covers during the next several years were a jumping horse, a champion pointer, the sea elephant Goliath II ("insanely popeyed, ponderously oozy, hideously fierce of tusk and whisker"), the race horse Cavalcade and four Derby horses on one cover.

TIME'S first Christmas scene appeared on the Dec. 26, 1938 cover, and similar covers have since run on four other Christmas issues. During the war and early postwar years, maps appeared several times on TIME'S covers. With the liberation of Paris, a symbolic map of that city was on the cover (Sept. 4, 1944), and the story began: "The news that made the whole free world catch its breath last week was the news that Paris was free . . . Paris is the city of all free mankind, and its liberation . . . was one of the great events of all time." Later maps were of some of the world's troubled spots: Jerusalem (Aug. 26, 1946) and India-Pakistan (Oct. 27, 1947).

The rising stock market has been twice depicted, first with the baby bull ("Wall Street was nursing a baby bull, and a lot of cow-eyed mother love was suddenly loose in the land"), then with a 'rampaging bull two years later (June 14, 1948; June 5, 1950). Another cover symbolized Coca-Cola's postwar conquests as dozens of new Coke bottlers opened plants around the globe ("As Cokemen surveyed their empire, on which the sun never sets, their blood almost audibly fizzed with pride").

But most of such covers TIME has printed in recent years have been symbols of a bewildered world at mid-century -- Mark III, the fabulous calculating machine (Jan. 23, 1950), the Pentagon (July 2, 1951), the Kremlin's warlike peace dove (Sept. 17, 1951), the partly human figure of the U.S. taxpayer in the wringer (March 10), and television's fixed eye (July 14).

Some excerpts from the cover stories: "Modern man has become accustomed to machines with superhuman muscles, but machines with superhuman brains are still a little frightening." "The Pentagon ... is simple in concept and organization, infinitely complex in detail; a marvel of systematic sense when the system is mastered, a mire of confusion when it is not."

This week, leaving the earth to its own complex and confused devices, TIME'S cover takes you out of this world to the mysterious and challenging realms of outer space.

Cordially yours,

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