Dear Time-Reader

Because you write us more often about our cover stories than about any other stories in TIME, you may be interested in knowing how a cover story is put together. For instance, take last week's cover on California's Amadeo Peter Giannini.

Our editors tell me that the final decision to do the Giannini cover was made ten days before the issue came out. The decision was squarely on the news: the next week Giannini's Bank of America passed Manhattan's Chase National Bank in deposits, putting it once again in the lead for the title of world's richest bank. This made a good newspeg for telling the story of the current prosperity and boundless optimism of the Pacific Coast.

For weeks Sidney James's Pacific Coast staff had been bombarding us with copy on the coast's present situation. Still needed was an examination of the part that Giannini and his sprawling banking system had played and would play in it. Giannini was sunning himself at Palm Beach. Our nearest staff correspondent (Atlanta) was sick; so we sent Ed Lockett, one of our Washington bureau's most experienced reporters, to get Giannini's side of the story. Unable to find a plane seat on such short notice, Lockett took the night train. On the way he read through a stack of material he picked up on the Giannini bank's activities and filed us a summary of it. And, as a warning not to expect early copy, he kept sending bulletins on how late his train was.

From Lockett on, the Giannini cover procedure is pretty complicated. To try to simplify it, I asked one of our artists to draw the diagram you see. What it means is that in order to give one of our National Affairs writers, Paul O'Neil, all the information he needed we called on our Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington bureaus to interview the people who could supply it, put our researchers here in Manhattan to work culling the material we already had in our morgue and supplementing it with local interviews.

The result was that by Saturday O'Neil had read the 35,000 words our correspondents had sent in, as well as the material from his own researchers, and was ready to write his story. With enough material to do a book, his job was to write the story in about 2,500 words.

Meanwhile, Artzybasheff's cover portrait of Giannini was rolling off the press at the rate of 20,000 an hour, and illustration for the story was piling up for final selection. Assistant Managing Editor Dana Tasker had okayed the press proof of Artzybasheff's cover, helped plan the map of California and the San Francisco picture layout.

Like all TIME stories, the completed cover went to a senior editor (in this case Otto Fuerbringer), then to Managing Editor T. S. Matthews, for editing. As usual, our researchers had the last crack at it--to see that the facts were all straight. The story finally went to press early Tuesday morning, April 9.

The only casualty in this involved process was Lockett, who had to interview Giannini on the wide-open sun deck of his hotel and on the unsheltered Florida beaches. "Oh," said Giannini, "you'll tan." Lockett knew better. As usual, he just burned and peeled.

Cordially,

James A. Linen

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