Dear Time Reader

In a sense, every editor and. writer on TIME'S editorial staff is a picture editor. All have a say in the selection of the 65 or so pictures (culled from about 10,000) that appear each week in TIME. But the man who (with the Managing Editor) has the final say is Robert Boyd, Senior Editor in charge of pictures and production.

In addition to a picture staff of 12 assistant editors, researchers and layout men, Boyd's crew includes some 27 production assistants, teletypeset-ters and proofreaders. Finding the right pictures to illustrate our stories is a big job; fitting the edited stories and the pictures into their allotted space in the magazine, and transmitting them to the printing plants in Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles is a bigger job. The Production Department, which handles this meticulous, involved operation, has adopted as its motto: "All the news printed that fits."

Bob Boyd's week begins calmly enough on Thursday and moves like a rising pressure gauge through a welter of pictures, photostats, magazine dummies, make-up forms and teletypesetter copy to a climax around 3 a.m. on Tuesday when he gets the final "We are ready to say goodnight" from the printing plants. By that time all of the editors' picture and production requirements have been settled to the best of Boyd's and his assistants' ability. They have probably combed the country to find the one right picture to illustrate some special story. They may have helped an editor re-make his department as many as three times so that it will look better and read better.

All of it adds up to an exacting job done under high-speed pressure--and Bob Boyd is the man for it. For one thing, he is 100-proof tireless. He suspects that the average man gets too much sleep, and claims that four or five hours a night is about right for himself. He is seldom, if ever, sick. He considers the onset of a common cold a personal affront, and has a theory that the way to lick it is to stay up and fight it. These attributes have had an astonishing effect on Boyd's staff. They may not quite have Boyd's bounce at the end of a 14-to 1 6-hour closing day, but they usually manage to keep up the pace.

In college (Princeton) Bob Boyd played lacrosse and water polo, and was a member of the Triangle Club (amateur theatricals). A native New Yorker, he was graduated into the Depression year of 1932 as a psychology major ("of all things"). Openings in that field being scarce, he took a job demonstrating floor waxers. This led to selling magazine subscriptions and a job on Newsweek addressing envelopes to U.S. Senators. In 1938 Bob Boyd came to work for TIME.

For a busy man, Boyd manages to find time for a surprising number of extracurricular activities.

He is an amateur astronomer who put together his own telescope, a photographer whose skill seldom matches his editor's eye for a good picture.

He skis and plays golf. At his home in the Catskills, where he and his wife spend summer vacations, he is "chief of a small tribe of Indians" which includes his own two children and their friends. His golf games with members of his staff are famed for their surprising turns. In one such game, after betting agreements had been reached on the proper penalty for all known infractions of the rules, Boyd teed off and somehow contrived to knock the ball into his golf bag.

My personal admiration for the demanding job that Bob Boyd does each week is unlimited. I realize, however, that no matter what I write about him he will have the final say : he is the last man on TIME to see this copy before it goes to the printer.

Cordially yours,

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