IN the coming weeks and months, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara can expect to find in his mail a steady stream of letters from TIME readers around the world, and a considerable number of them will send along this week's cover requesting his autograph. This has long been the experience of TIME cover subjects, who find the number of autograph seekers growing. United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson (Dec. 14) has already sent off a stack of autographed covers to such countries as Iran, West Germany, India and France, as well as to places all across the U.S., and has more on his desk awaiting his signature; Architect Minoru Yamasaki (Jan. 18) has heard from as far away as Rangoon and Kenya.

Among the autograph seekers are quite a number of serious collectors, of whom the champion is Retired U.S. Army Colonel Robert F. Carter, 63, of Topsham, Me. (TIME, May 4, 1959), who now has 1,100 autographed TIME covers. Colonel Carter, who has all but 40 of the more than 2,080 issues of TIME published since the first one dated March 3, 1923, plans to have his collection carried on to March 3, 2023, TIME'S 100th anniversary. He plans in his will to provide that the collection be sold, and the proceeds given to charity.

Onto TIME'S own mail desk recently dropped a letter from a reader who, while granting that he can never catch up with Colonel Carter, aims to become the leading collector of autographed TIME covers outside the U.S. He is Randall Salas, a slim, 17-year-old high school senior in Caracas, Venezuela. Randall, who was born in Curac,ao and speaks English, Spanish, Dutch and Papiamento (a Caribbean lingua franca), started his collection only in 1959. But he had a head start: his father, an insurance broker, has been reading TIME since 1935, and had saved many back copies. Randall now has 402 covers signed by subjects, among them Konrad Adenauer, Moise Tshombe, U.S. Astronaut Alan Shepard and Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, Marilyn Monroe (who signed in red ink), J. Paul Getty (who signed in black), and Tibet's Dalai Lama. Some of the signers send more than their autograph: John F. Kennedy enclosed an autographed picture with one of the two covers he signed; Abdul Karim Kassem (whose signature is a collector's item now), sent a copy of a speech he had just made; J. Edgar Hoover added some FBI pamphlets, and Soviet Defense Minister Malinovsky scribbled some propaganda right on his face: "We struggle for peace all over the world."

Even some of the few who refused have added nuggets to Randall's correspondence. When Admiral Hyman Rickover's secretary replied that the admiral never signed his name for anyone he did not know personally, Randall wrote right back, sending along a photograph of himself. (It didn't work.) He has kind notes from representatives of Jackie Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Albert Schweitzer and Winston Churchill saying that they are simply too busy to send autographs. When he tried to get Caryl Chessman's signature, however, he got only a steely note from an assistant warden of San Quentin saying that prisoners were not permitted to give autographs.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.