LIKE any organization in the public eye, we like to keep up with what others are saying about us. Occasionally other magazines will analyze our performance, as we do theirs. Some of the most interesting entries in the scrapbook, however, come from other, less predictable sources.

When Novelist Gwen Davis chose to describe a character in The Pretenders by means of a TIME Milestones item, she was following what has become a kind of minor tradition: the use of TIME's name or style to make a fictional point. Authors of movies, plays and novels have worked TIME stories into their plots to show, for instance, that a character has arrived. That ploy was used in the Broadway comedy Any Wednesday and in the current motion picture Who Is Harry Kellerman and why is he saying those to things about me? The device is neither new nor unique to American writers; Graham Greene, the British author, used it ten years ago in describing the background of his protagonist in A Burnt-Out Case.

In the movie The Fortune Cookie, the ambulance-chasing lawyer says that his crumpled client can be cured because doctors keep abreast of sophisticated new treatment techniques by reading TIME. The heroine of Lois Gould's recent novel Such Good Friends observes that the procedures being tried on her stricken husband will make the Medicine section if they work. In Pierre Salinger's present bestselling On Instructions of My Government, a Mafia type reads TIME'S Latin American edition and discovers that he may be the quarry of an FBI manhunt.

Other sorts of public notices tend toward the political or satiric. In Li'lAbner, Al Capp occasionally has a laugh with "Lime" magazine.

The Harvard Lampoon has done its thing in our image, and P.G. Wodehouse once wrote a poem, "TIME Like an Ever-Rolling Stream," about our masthead. Poet Allen Ginsberg viewed us from his rather special perspective in his counterculture epic America:

I'm obsessed by TIME Magazine

I read it every week

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.

I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.

If Ginsberg does not exactly enjoy his obsession, another TIME watcher is more positive (and eclectic). Matthew Fox, a Roman Catholic theologian, this year published Religion U.S.A.: Religion and Culture by Way of TIME Magazine. In 451 pages, Fox argues that the magazine is as symbolic was its era's attitudes and aspirations as Chartres Cathedral was of the Middle Ages.

Rambling through the scrapbook has its serious aspect; it reminds us of TIME'S place in the world and hence the responsibility we must attempt to meet each week. Mostly, however, the numerous allusions to TIME demonstrate the amusing side of being a household word.

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