John Shaw Billings was only mildly enthusiastic when Editor Henry R. Luce told a group of Time Inc. executives over lunch one day in 1936 about his idea for a new kind of magazine devoted to pictures. Billings, then managing editor of TIME, was too busy running the nation's first weekly newsmagazine to give the new project much thought. But nine months later, Luce called him in to say that the experiment was a shambles and that he wanted Billings to take it over. There was one little problem: the first issue was scheduled to go to press in 17 days.
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