--- title: TIME Inc. Archivist Bill Hooper on 100 Years of Covers description: Hooper discusses the colorful personalities behind the red border, and where the publication's influence can be seen today. canonical: https://time.com/collections/a-century-of-impact/6256474/time-inc-archivist-bill-hooper-interview/ article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-02-28T12:00:26.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-01-29T13:10:50.000Z article:section: History og:title: Marking TIME's Centennial With the Man Who Knows Its History Best: 100 Years of TIME og:description: Marking TIME's Centennial With the Man Who Knows Its History Best: TIME revisits 100 years of making history og:url: https://time.com/collections/a-century-of-impact/6256474/time-inc-archivist-bill-hooper-interview/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd1a4be5b3434d455/698a3ab247ca38c97d3ba8b0/time-centennial-luce-letter-social-new.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: Marking TIME's Centennial With the Man Who Knows Its History Best: 100 Years of TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Marking TIME's Centennial With the Man Who Knows Its History Best: 100 Years of TIME twitter:description: Marking TIME's Centennial With the Man Who Knows Its History Best: TIME revisits 100 years of making history twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd1a4be5b3434d455/698a3ab247ca38c97d3ba8b0/time-centennial-luce-letter-social-new.jpg?branch=production --- Updated: Jan 29, 2026Published: Feb 28, 2023 # Marking TIME's Centennial With the Man Who Knows Its History Best > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/) ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer  Letter From Henry Luce to Parents: When TIME’s co-founders Briton Hadden and Henry Luce were still in pre-production on the new kind of news magazine, they played around with a number of titles for their publication. Here, Luce tells his parents about the idea to call the magazine “TIME,” and plays around with some slogans that would be used in later advertising campaigns. Letter From Henry Luce to Parents: When TIME’s co-founders Briton Hadden and Henry Luce were still in pre-production on the new kind of news magazine, they played around with a number of titles for their publication. Here, Luce tells his parents about the idea to call the magazine “TIME,” and plays around with some slogans that would be used in later advertising campaigns. Fan Chen for TIME; Photo-illustration by TIME When Bill Hooper started work as an archivist for Time Inc. in 1980, the company was headquartered in the Time-Life building in New York City’s Rockefeller Center complex and the artifacts that told the story of TIME’s history were housed on-site. Hooper quickly became a go-to for staffers’ questions about the history of the publication—always ready with a Henry Luce quote or an appropriate anecdote or example. The [Time Inc. archives](https://www.nyhistory.org/library/time-inc-archive) moved to the New-York Historical Society in 2015, but Hooper remains a vital resource and source of knowledge.  Bill Hooper, the Time Inc. archivist, right, and Michael Ryan, left, the library director of the New-York Historical Society, in the Time-Life archive storage space in New York, Nov. 4, 2015. Sam Hodgson—The New York Times/Redux In the walk-up to the 100th anniversary of TIME’s first issue—dated March 3, 1923—we spoke to Hooper about the most exciting items in the archives, the colorful personalities behind the red border, and where the publication’s influence can be seen today. **_Read more:_** [_13 Amazing Artifacts From Inside the Time Inc. Archives_](https://time.com/4116950/amazing-historical-artifacts-from-time/) **TIME: Henry Luce and Briton Hadden co-founded TIME, but I think it’s fair to say that Luce is better known for it. Do you think the credit for the magazine’s 1923 launch is fairly proportioned?** I think he does \[get more credit\], just because Brit Hadden died so young \[in 1929 at age 31\]. It was Luce who built the empire, but Hadden was the editorial genius. **What exactly was his editorial genius?** He was very interested in language and brevity because he thought the _Literary Digest_ and the New York _Times_ were just too dense and that people were too busy to sift through all of that. He wanted to come up with a magazine that would get you all the news you needed in a week and break it down by sections—Theater, U.S. News, Medicine—which was fairly unique at that time. It was about getting the information to readers in really punchy writing and the much-parodied Homeric [backward-running sentences](https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/backward-ran-sentences/2011/10/26/gIQA2m6FDN%5Fstory.html), which made it very memorable for people.  Early TIME magazine staffers outside the original building in New York City, circa 1924\. Top row: Briton Hadden; left-right: John S. Martin, T.J.C. Martyn and Niven Busch. The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock **Are there any stories that stand out to you of writers or editors over the years who were real characters?** James Agee always wore the same yellow flannel shirt every day. When TIME was in the Chrysler Building, John S. Martin, who was a cousin of Hadden’s, always kept a rifle in his office and would sometimes shoot birds out the window. One time, a duck that he shot landed on the roof of an adjoining building, and he got one of the office boys to go over and retrieve it for him. **What are your favorite bits of surprising trivia about TIME you’ve learned over the years?** One is the influence that TIME has had on the English language. It coined words like mass market, Tex-Mex, nightclub, homophobia, commute, poster, racketeer, newscast, glitterati, and coffee break. Another thing that fascinated me was there was a woman who worked for years on the TIME copy desk named Marie Menken Maas. She was an artist and avant-garde filmmaker, married to an English professor at Wagner College. They lived in a penthouse apartment on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, and they would have these alcohol-fueled salons every weekend, and their guests were frequently Truman Capote and Edward Albee. Albee acknowledged that Marie and her husband were the [inspirations](https://wagner.edu/wagnermagazine/whos-the-source-for-virginia-woolf/) for Martha and George in _Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?_ [**_Read the First Issue_** _Here in the TIME Vault_](http://www.time.com/vault/issue/1923-03-03/page/1) **What was the office like when you first started in 1980?** It was the era of the cocktail cart on magazine closing nights. The reference librarians had to stay really late. I was a heavy smoker. I had ashtrays on my desk. There were ashtrays in the elevators. I did love the coffee cart, too. **What are some of the most prized possessions in the archive?** Documents and letters from Winston Churchill and Joseph McCarthy. Henry Luce had a long relationship with Churchill because he was an admirer, but also because he wanted to \[publish\] Churchill’s memoirs. McCarthy didn’t like TIME’s coverage of him, \[especially a 1951\] cover of him and underneath, it said “Demagogue McCarthy.” So he wrote several letters threatening to lead an advertising boycott of TIME magazine that was gonna put us out of business. But he did not succeed.  John F. Kennedy TIME Subscription: Joe Kennedy, father of President John F. Kennedy, sent a letter to Luce in 1957 with a gift subscription receipt enclosed. Kennedy wrote, “You see, even twenty-four years ago when Jack was at the ripe old age of fifteen, I thought he should begin reading ‘Time.’ Could it be that the diligent support of this idea has made him as smart as he is?” Fan Chen for TIME **What are some of your most unexpected finds in the archives?** President John F. Kennedy’s daddy, Joseph Kennedy, was going through his files, and he found a gift subscription card \[from when\] he had given a subscription to JFK when he was a teenager, and thought Luce would like it. His letter to Luce was wondering if \[the magazine\] was one of the things that made his son so smart. One of our correspondents during World War II ended up in Hitler’s headquarters and wrote a letter on Hitler’s stationery, at his typewriter, to the magazine. It was heavy cream-colored stationary with a heavily embossed swastika on it. It was a fascinating, ghastly artifact. But it was fascinating that \[TIME\] was there. **What are some of the places where you see the influence of TIME in other news coverage today?** TIME invented the newsmagazine. _Newsweek_ was started by Thomas J.C. Martyn, TIME’s first foreign news editor. When TIME briefly re-located to Cleveland, Martin had a family, and Luce wouldn’t pay to move him, so he quit and started _Newsweek_ \[in 1933\]_._ Brevity was something that they really focused on in the early days of TIME. It was essentially rewriting primarily New York _Times_ articles thought to be too long and dense, and so they shortened them and punched them up. With news sites now, there’s an emphasis on the economy of language. 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