MOVING a magazine is like ordering 100,000 gallons of alphabet soup, to go. Last week, in Manhattan, it went. After 22 years at 9 Rockefeller Plaza, TIME'S editorial apparatus--from green pencils to Teletypesetting machines--moved a block west to the new 48-story TIME and LIFE Building at 50th Street and the Avenue of the Americas.

Turning up for work after their usual Monday-Tuesday weekend, editors, writers and researchers pushed through the revolving doors with eyes akimbo, walked across serpentine tile inlays in the lobby floor. "It looks like the walk at the edge of the beach in Rio," said Senior Editor James Keogh.

In one elevator car, even the Muzak was silent as conservative Art Editor Alexander Eliot flicked his beard thoughtfully and pronounced: "The lack of horizontal accents on the outside makes for an intensely dramatic but unassuring effect--like an exclamation point." Up in the new quarters, corridors with vinyl floors, offices with deep-pile carpeting suggested the passageways and staterooms of a transatlantic liner.

Contributing Editor John M. Scott said he expected to be called to lifeboat drill. There were some cries of alarm and many squeals of delight: Books Researchers Joyce Haber and Ruth Brine found themselves in a cozy, five-window corner office that hung over the city like a B-36 turret.

On every desk was a precision-balanced draftsman's lamp; whole walls were covered with a fabric that would accept thumbtacks; through a first-of-its-kind telephone system, wives, friends and public-relations men could bypass the main switchboard, reach TIME people from anywhere in the U.S. by dialing LL6 and the appropriate extension. Interior decorators put up a fight for their geometrical inventions, but were mowed down by furniture-shifting editors with ideas of their own. Senior Editor A. T. Baker even brought along his old, scarred typing table. The new ones are built like wall shelves, but Baker likes to drape his legs around his typewriter.

In the wire room, 22 brand-new Teleprinter machines can be put into immediate, two-way communication with offices all over the world--a tool available to the editors of no other magazine. Through the ceilings, pneumatic tubes carry copy from writers to copy desk, to editors et al. As the first week moved toward its deadline, writers fed their material into the tubes and paled with fear that the entire March 21 issue would become jammed and stay forever in the ceiling. But at press time the copy was ready and printed, as you can see . . .

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