Before a TIME story goes to press, staffers attempt to verify every fact in it--a painstaking process that would be impossible without our reference library. Reporter-Researcher Sue Raffety, while checking this week's cover story on worldwide inflation, came across Writer James Grant's observation that the ancient Lydians invented metallic money. She called Head Research Librarian Harold Lateiner who, after finding three encyclopedias in conflict, confirmed the statement by consulting two major texts on the history of money. Elapsed time: 15 minutes.

Lateiner has been through this kind of thing before. He has been with the library since its birth in 1929 and has seen it grow from a small, quiet reading room to one of the largest journalistic research facilities in the world. Its 14 research librarians field more than 100,000 queries a year from Time Inc. people (53,000 last year from TIME alone). Presided over by Chief Librarian Benjamin Lightman, the library holds extensive microfilm records of TIME correspondents' dispatches, plus 500,000 highly specialized file folders containing countless millions of newspaper and magazine clippings (sample subjects: children's motels, underwater painting, women astronauts). There are also some 75,000 books, including all standard reference works and such useful exotica as A History of the Umbrella and A Dictionary of Angels.

Despite this sea of information, the answer to the average query is fished out in only ten minutes or so because the librarians know precisely where to look. When Mildred Lenhardt was asked recently whether real wages in Britain had risen between 1860 and 1920, she found out--in two minutes--that they had. Other typical questions: whether John Adams wore breeches or trousers to his Inauguration (trousers); and what color Winston Churchill's famed "siren" suit was (sky blue); whether Japan was importing most of its oil from the U.S. just before World War II (it was).

Outsiders might imagine that the work is tedious. Nonsense, says Lateiner, who, after 45 years, still finds the chase for facts "very exciting." Some of the most interesting challenges are the handful of queries that cannot be answered quickly. Lateiner spent half a day in 1961 discovering that the line "Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan," quoted by President Kennedy, comes from the diary of Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's Foreign Minister. Only in 1968 did Bartlett's Familiar Quotations get around to listing it.

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