TIME has sometimes been known to describe how many thousands of words our correspondents filed to us on a given story, and how many books a researcher worked her way through to provide background for a writer. But we never brag about how many words it takes to bring the story to the reader. We would rather be praised for economy.

And we prefer not to regard it as waste if a great many words are required at the outset to establish a point that eventually can be made simply. We find such detailed preparation essential to provide the documentation that buttresses a judgment or rebuts a counterargument. But when all is said and done, we are happiest when the essence of a story can be told as quickly as the description of the 88th Congress in this week's NATION section:

"In three months, the Congress has filibustered, fulminated, frittered around--and passed precisely one bill that might by any stretch of the imagination be considered major."

FOR those who feel reassured by the statistical underpinning beneath a TIME story, it might be noted that the Washington file alone for this week's cover story on Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman totaled 45,000 words. It took a heap of filing to describe something of what goes on in 4,844 rooms and what is said along the eight miles of corridors that make up Washington's second largest bureaucracy.

Associate Editor William Bowen separated wheat from chaff, and had enough unused words to fill a few storage bins, but none so large as those grain storage bins in Kansas that are shown on the cover.

IN telling the news of art, in words and pictures, we have frequently made reference to the historic Armory Show of 1913, when modern art first made its shocking impact on America. It was such a watershed event that, as long ago as 1956, our editors put down in their "futures book" a resolve to seek out and show anew the pictures that created such a fuss. The idea occurred at about the same time to a museum official in Utica, N.Y., who early this year was able to reassemble about 300 of the original works for a showing in Utica. This week the show returns to the original armory; and to commemorate the event, TIME prints eight color pages of paintings from the original show. Most were photographed in Utica, but two came from museums in The Hague and Milwaukee, and another from a private collection in Philadelphia. The big art story of 1913 returns as a major art story in 1963.

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