A Letter From The Publisher, Nov. 4, 1957

MR. MAXIM,” asked New Haven Carriage-Maker William Hooker Atwood in 1896, “do you want this carriage to look like a Western buggy-maker’s job or do you want it to be a gentleman’s carriage?” Answered Hiram Percy Maxim, builder of the Mark I Electric Phaeton: “Like a gentleman’s carriage, Mr. Atwood.” For almost half a century, the U.S. automobile was indeed a “gentleman’s carriage,” built for men and bought on the basis of its mechanical excellence, not its sculptured lines or pleasing colors. Today, the woman buys the car —and she wants something called “style,” a demand that keeps Detroit’s automakers peering far into the future. For a report on the little-known group of specialists who put the style in Detroit’s new models, see BUSINESS, The Cellini of Chrome.

LAST March TIME’S correspondents and stringers in a score of U.S. communities tested the mood of the nation, reported a new sense of normalcy in which Americans were learning to live with continual crisis (TIME, March 18). One Western banker compared the U.S. to a small boy walking a fence: “After a while he gets so good at it that he quits worrying about falling.” Was the boy, in the wake of Sputnik, Russia’s missile boasts and another Middle East crisis, still so cocksure about his balance? Last week TIME’S correspondents again plumbed the mood of the nation, found that the normalcy of March had given way to a new sense of urgency. See NATIONAL AFFAIRS, Rocket’s Red Glare.

AMONG his other claims to fame, Greek Shipping King Stavros Spyros Niarchos has an art collection worth millions scattered in half a dozen residences in the U.S. and abroad, ashore and afloat. To photograph the favorite paintings that Niarchos keeps aboard his palatial yacht Creole, TIME sent London-based Photographer Larry Burrows flying down to ViHefranche on the French Riviera. Burrows soon ran into trouble: customs red tape ruled out taking the art works ashore; vibration from the yacht’s big generators (which Burrows checked by placing a Vichy bottle on deck, watching it quiver) made picture-taking aboard ship impossible. But with Niarchos’ aid, Burrows found an emergency source of power for his lights. Some of the harbor’s available motorboats were rounded up and their generators wired together for current so that the yacht’s power plant could be stilled. For the results of Burrows’ efforts, and the story of a fabulous collector and his collection, see ART, The Golden Fleece.