There have been many changes in TIME since the first issue in March 1923. Some of the original sections have been dropped. Some new ones have been added to fit the changing scene. Others have been introduced for a temporary period and later dropped when the need for them had passed (such as WORLD BATTLEFRONTS in World War II). One department, however, which began with the magazine and remains unchanged today, is the "calendar of the triumphs, defeats and contortions of the human spirit" recorded each week in the MISCELLANY section.

In many ways, MISCELLANY is the most difficult column in the magazine to fill. For one thing, the rules of the game require that every item be written in one sentence, and some amusing short news stories simply will not compress into one sentence. Further, the item must appeal to 1) the writer, 2) the senior editor, 3) the managing editor, and 4) the researcher.

Ideas for the MISCELLANY section come from newspaper items, the wire services, and TIME'S own correspondents. But the biggest single source of suggestions is TIME readers, who send in an average of 300 ideas each week. They come from all over the world. There is one consistent contributor who lives in New Zealand; there are eight regular contributors who are currently living in the Ohio Penitentiary. One veteran MISCELLANY correspondent is Captain Frank Luckel, U.S. Navy (ret.), now a member of the California state legislature, who sent in his first contribution in 1930.

On Thursday, the MISCELLANY writer goes through his harvest of suggestions, sorts out the promising ones. Usually, he writes about twice the number of items that will see final print. After the item is written, the next step is to give it a heading. Wrote one TIME reader from New Hampshire recently: "Would you please tell me who is responsible for the titles given the various items of your MISCELLANY columns?" Answer: the writer gives the item the heading he likes best, and hopes the editors agree. If they do not, it is changed. This becomes a sort of game. If the writer gets 50% of his headings passed, he considers his batting average pretty good.

The next step is the choice of which items are going to run in the magazine. Apart from editorial preference, part of the elimination comes in checking. An item may fall in the wastebasket because the facts do not check, or because it may turn out to be weeks or months old. There was, for example, an item from Arkansas that looked fine on paper: in South Africa, forest rangers had a problem with leopards, which were eating all the pigs, which had been imported to eat caterpillars, which had been eating pine trees, and the rangers still needed the leopards to keep down the baboon population. On checking, the item turned out to be a two-year-old false rumor. Sometimes, however, an item improves in checking. For example, when w?e double-checked a suggestion about a Boston dancer who had consumed a monstrous, $12 restaurant breakfast, we found it was not only true, but that she had done it again a week later (TIME, Dec. 17, 1951).

Since the MISCELLANY section requires tight writing, the exercise of editorial judgment and extreme checking for accuracy, it is often used as a training spot for new TIME writers. Current MISCELLANY writer is Manhattan-born Peter Braestrup, whose miscellaneous early achievements include: learning to read Robinson Crusoe in Danish at the age of seven (tutored by his grandfather, who was head of the Danish penal system); at the age of twelve, writing a 248-page novel (unpublished) called Johnny the Guy ("which antedated Mickey Spillane"). When he first started writing MISCELLANY, Braestrup, a Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War, coined his own description of the assignment: "A boot camp for writers."

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