ONE of the best-known passages in The Catcher in the Rye is Holden Caulfield's comment: "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it." Fans of Author Salinger are an especially frustrated lot; there is no calling him up "whenever you felt like it." He is the most private of public authors.

The job of gathering the facts about him for this week's cover story, without unduly compromising his privacy, was both hard and intriguing. Cover Artist Robert Vickrey, 35, is an old Salinger fan and hoped for a sitting--but had to be content with working from one of the few recent photographs of Salinger extant.

Illustrations for the story are by Russell Hoban, 36, who is such a Salinger fan that he and his wife named two of their daughters after Salinger characters, Esme and Phoebe. In painting how Zooey, Franny, Mrs. Glass and Holden look to him, Hoban was fearful of violating "their private rights to exist in the reader's mind," and tried to be scrupulous to the author. "Salinger, I think, is a man without eyelids," says Hoban. "All of his material comes to him so painfully; it costs so much to write, more than anyone else who comes to mind."

Writer of the cover story is Jack Skow, 29, who has spent the past five years at TIME, mostly reviewing books.

"Before that, I chased cops for Providence and Boston papers." He wrote one of Time's most-talked-about articles last year, coining the phrase and describing the practice of publishing "non-books." He was at Oberlin College when The Catcher in the Rye came out, "and liked it enormously, but did not identify with Holden Caulfield, because at the time I thought I was Eugene Gant." (Translation for the Holden Caulfield set: Skow was then hung on Tom Wolfe.)

THE ART section features four pages of color reproductions of Chinese masterpieces now touring the U.S.--and being shown this week at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art. TIME readers first saw samples of this unique treasure in color four years ago, when TIME photographed the collection in Formosa. For the four pages of old scrolls shown this week, Art Director Michael J. Phillips sought a gloss-free paper that would bring out the delicate detail, the color and the appearance of the silk originals. In the end, he had the paper made to his specifications at the Mead Paper Co. in Kingsport, Tenn., and flew down to make sure of the quality. Engravings were made in New York by Len Perskie. Then Phillips was off to Detroit to oversee the reproduction by the Safran Printing Co., which used an offset press to give finer detail. To Phillips, it is all part of the week's work, but there can be nothing casual about careful color reproduction.

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