A Letter From The Publisher, Sep. 25, 1978

Some TIME readers are sentimental and send us cards at Christmas. A few are even smitten enough to mail valentines to their favorite writers. But Donald Lehnus, an associate professor of library science, recently set an epistolary precedent. Quite unsolicited, he mailed us his 156-page computer analysis of 2,814 TIME cover subjects from 1923 to 1977, a scholarly study chockablock with statistical tables and chronological comparisons.

Lehnus, who teaches at the University of Puerto Rico, spent eight months on his project. His starting point was Faces in the News, a booklet published by...

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