NINE out of ten of our readers get TIME in the mail, but reader No. 10 picks it up at the newsstand. Our newsstand sales naturally vary with the temper of the news, as well as the seasons. Some complicated events draw readers to us, who want to have it all spelled out in one comprehensive story.

Those weeks our newsstand sales go up, even though we might have someone else--a movie star or a novelist--on the cover. Other weeks it is the cover that seems to be the draw. And often, of course, cover subject, newsi-ness and public interest happily coincide. Such was the case with the recent Billie Sol Estes cover. The newsstand interest in this spectacular Texas bankrupt, added to the rising number of regular TIME subscribers, combined to make that issue our alltime leader in circulation, with 2,784,000 copies.

THAT figure doesn't count another 705,000 copies of our five international editions. Those copies, in English and predominantly air-sped, are identical in editorial content to the U.S. edition, though differing in advertising. In Latin America we add four pages of regional news, and in Canada four pages of Canadian news.

Those Canadian pages are currently jumping, with a national election on. We now print in Montreal (288,000 copies a week) and recently established a satellite editorial staff there, headed by Canadian John Scott, to write and edit our Canadian coverage right on the scene. This week they are doing something unique in TIME'S history: putting out a cover story of their own. Their issue, of course, contains the complete Nelson Rockefeller cover story. But the cover is a specially drawn Canadian political cartoon (see cut) straight out of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Canada's leading cartoonist, Duncan MacPherson, aware that the summer Shakespearean season at Stratford, Ontario, coincided with the June 18 national election, put his Prime Minister John Diefenbaker (center) and Liberal Opponent Lester Pearson (holding the lion) in the motley of a couple of Shakespearean comics. He didn't try to indicate the winner, which, to judge by Canada's latest Gallup poll, is a risky business.

OUR regular cover is of a man who in his daily life is surrounded by art, whether it be the Currier and Ives in his office, the U.S. historical paintings in the Governor's Mansion in Albany, or his own immensely valuable collection of more than 1,000 paintings. Since his taste runs to the modern and not to the old masters, his collection favors bursts of color and form, not portraits. And he is not much for having himself painted. Only once before, during World War II, when all the brothers got themselves painted, did he sit. This time, he posed for seven hours for TIME Artist Henry Koerner. He likes the finished painting, but Nelson Rockefeller is not one to enjoy holding one position for a long time. "I feel like a sphinx," he protested to Koerner.

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