THE party is over, but melodies linger on. From our readers, we have been receiving comments on our 40th anniversary cover story of Lincoln. Lamont M. Jensen of Salt Lake City, who thinks it should be required reading for every Ph.D. candidate, asks, "Who is the individual (singular or plural) directly responsible for writing the article on the individual in America?" Reader Jensen's question is happily phrased, for the responsibility as usual is both singular and plural. The story was written by Henry Grunwald, and edited by Champ Clark. They had the help of three researchers, Margaret Quimby, Martha McDowell and Mary Vanaman, and numberless correspondents in their forays into history and into contemporary attitudes toward the individual. As for the cover portrait, Artist Robert Vickrey looked at just about every available Lincoln photograph and painting, and found none entirely suitable. He created his own from his impression of them all, and from the Lincoln in his own mind's eye. We had asked only that his Lincoln be a serious one, and an older rather than a younger Lincoln. Artist Vickrey reports that his portrait most resembles the last known photograph of Lincoln, taken in the final months of the President's life.

WE have also been hearing from many of the nearly 300 cover subjects who joined us in a weekend of celebrations. For them, and for all our readers, we publish this week a special section of text and pictures about the occasion. We have always felt a special relationship with most of our "cover characters," having singled them out, painted them, searched out their life stories from their families, neighbors and associates, and interviewed them at length. We were pleased to find that the subjects often seemed to feel a similar bond. Actress Rosalind Russell is such a devoted TIME reader that she once papered her pool house with TIME covers.

From London, the mighty Thunderer was heard from. From its august heights, and with the gravity of its 175 years, the Times of London took notice of TIME'S 40, and found the magazine as deserving of good wishes as any of "all the new phenomena of that wonderfully prolific period of the 1920s." TIME looks easy to imitate, wrote the Times, but the imitators usually do not last: "Only those who have been close to TIME know how highly original a production each issue is, and the prodigious--some might say ridiculous--expenditure of thought, money, and energy that goes into it ... Outwardly it seems the most conservative of all publications. Part of its attraction is its comfortable familiarity. But like men's clothes it is continually changing. Darwin taught us that evolution is the best kind of change to breed stayers." Since the Times has already proved its own inbred capacity for staying, we gratefully acknowledge its Darwinian tribute to our "powerful adaptability," its judgment that at age 40 we are "stimulatingly alive" and ready for a long future.

THE flow of the news--and not any rigidity of planning--often determines the sequence of our covers. Still, it seems appropriate that exactly 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln's face should be followed on TIME'S cover by that of James Baldwin, who argues that a century has not brought enough further emancipation for his fellow Negroes, and urges them to do it themselves--as they were trying to do last week in Birmingham.

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