A Letter From The Publisher, Jul. 6, 1959

FEW reporters anywhere cover more ground than TIME’S Australian correspondent, Fred B. Hubbard, 39, who newspapered in Chicago before moving to Brisbane twelve years ago. Hubbard’s beat embraces 2,948,366 sq. mi., some of them so untamed that when a story takes him to Australia’s Northern Territory, he sets foot on barren plains where aborigines still hunt wallabies. He has reported on the diet of platypuses, the music of the bushmen, and kuru, the strange back-country ailment in which the afflicted literally laugh themselves to death. Last week, just returned from an assignment on the subtropical island of New Guinea. Correspondent Hubbard had one story for TIME and another about TIME.

Poking about Hanuabada Village, a Port Moresby native quarter, Hubbard came across the village council clerk, Rima Gavera, sitting at a battered desk, engrossed in his reading. The reading matter: TIME. Clerk Gavera, a native Papuan, explained that he is a faithful reader of TIME (as are 1,000 other New Guineans), with a special interest. “I like stories about satellites,” he said, “and TIME has the best ones.” The other New Guinea tale from Correspondent Hubbard is reported in PRESS, Roll-Your-Own Newspaper.

EVER since they first appeared in the magazine last fall. TIME LISTINGS have been enthusiastically received. The editors’ choice of books, movies, TV shows, Broadway and off-Broadway and on-tour plays have been both a guide for readers and a closely studied report card for pros. In keeping with the season, the department has put on a straw hat, and this week’s LISTINGS has a selection of the most interesting summer theater offerings from Maine to California.

THE assorted objects against a cool sea painted on this week’s cover by Artist Aaron Bohrod are familiar symbols of the oceanographer’s trade. The brownish-pink PGR (Precision Graphic Record), from which the portrait emerges, is used to make a portrait of the ocean floor. The record that served as a model was actually made on July 15, 1958 and shows part of the profile of the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean some 70 miles northeast of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. Behind the graph paper is a yellow Nansen Bottle, used by oceanographers to take water samples, temperatures, and other deep-water measurements. The sailing ship is the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s pioneer research vessel, the Atlantis.