Publisher’s Letter, Jan. 21, 1957

DearTIME-Reader:

TIME’S cover presses had already begun printing last week when the news of Anthony Eden’s retirement came. TIME’S editors quickly decided to change to the portrait of Eden’s successor, Harold Macmillan. Within 24 hours, color presses were replated and printing the Macmillan cover.

Meanwhile, Associate Editor A. T. (“Bob”) Baker got ready for his 24th cover story since he joined TIME’S staff just ten years ago. His first was about President Truman as Man of the Year (TIME, Jan. 3, 1949). In the next two years he wrote eleven more before he went off to London as a correspondent. While abroad, he did much of the reporting for cover stories on Thornton Wilder, Joyce Gary, Claire Bloom and Audrey Hepburn. Since his return in January 1954, Baker has not only written twelve other cover stories but also edited those on King Hussein of Jordan, Actor Rex Harrison, Michigan State’s Coach Duffy Daugherty and Singer Maria Callas.

An old salt from Philadelphia, who served as round-the-world navigator on his father’s schooner and as a lieutenant commander in World War II, Baker still finds that every cover story requires a different trim of the sails. The main job in his Grace Kelly cover was to catch the cool, white-gloved elegance of a new kind of Hollywood star. With André Malraux it was to define the place of an elusive literary and political figure in the complicated world of contemporary French intellectualism. Other cover stories have been fast-breaking narratives of a man in the week’s news, as at the time when Tito was host to Bulganin and Khrushchev in the spring of 1955, or the detailed exposition of an involved political situation, as in the Eden cover (TIME, Nov. 19) at the height of the Suez crisis. This week’s cover story, says Baker, had to combine most of these elements.

IN another last turnaround, TIME’S Art section this week is reproducing the prizewinners in the Art Institute of Chicago’s 62nd showing of American art and the 25th biennial exhibition of American paintings at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery as the awards are announced and the shows open. The Washington winners had already been picked. But the Chicago winners were not to be chosen until less than two weeks before the opening. Art Director Michael Phillips waited with a photographer in the gallery at the institute while the judges made their decision. Twenty-four hours after Phillips turned the photographer’s film over to our Chicago printers, color-corrected proofs of the prizewinners came off the press.

Cordially yours,