For all the gold there is or ever was Beneath the moon could buy no mite of rest For any one of these exhausted souls.

Thus did Dante Alighieri stigmatize men of affluence, looking at commerce from his rather remote and medieval vantage point. Dante dominates and illuminates this week's BOOKS section in a story that marks the 700th anniversary of his birth and is justly titled A Man for the Ages.

Today, gold and its equivalents are viewed somewhat differently, and the souls that strive for them are not necessarily exhausted. Quite a number of the stories in this issue deal in one way or another with getting and spending. The U.S. and WORLD BUSINESS sections, of course, are most immediately concerned, notably in our accounts of the stock market gyrations (One for the Bulls), and of a small nation paradoxically in a jam because of its natural wealth and high per-capita income (Trouble in the Garden). One of the most encouraging stories explains that it is still easier to make a million in the U.S. than anywhere else. Who has done it and how? See U.S. BUSINESS, How to Become a Millionaire (It Still Happens All the Time).

ESSAY probes a paradox of U.S. affluence--it seems almost necessary to be a millionaire to afford servants these days, but some people are trying todo something about it. See Help Wanted: Maybe Mary Poppins, Inc. Servants of the churches are not free of financial concerns either, and gone are the days of "the clergyman's rate." Men of the cloth now pay the full price. See RELIGION, The Disappearing Discount. And in the entertainment world, a blue-eyed crooner, son of a bartender, can make as much as $30,000 a week on the cabaret circuit. See SHOW BUSINESS, Song-&-Glance Man.

Another way to bag a boodle is to have the good luck to own property where some big enterprise wishes to build. See MODERN LIVING, Monuments to Stubbornness. Our cover story is a monument not to money but to a canny Scot who makes a lot of it. For a spin with the hottest rod on the road, see SPORT, Hero with a Hot Shoe.

All in all, it is quite a week for totting up what Dante called "empty winnings"--but what the winners themselves are likely to consider more paradisiacal than infernal.

EIGHT out of every ten TIME subscribers have gone to college, so the chances are good that your magazine reading includes at least one alumni journal. The editors of these publications have worked hard in recent years to make their magazines better looking and better reading. Early this year the American Alumni Council, feeling that their efforts should be recognized, asked TIME to appoint a board of judges to look over the magazines and pick the publication that showed the greatest improvement over the previous year. As it happens, every year for the past twelve we have made another award--to the college or university that has done the best job of keeping in touch with its graduates by mail.

Our judges completed their review in due course, and last week in Atlantic City, Steven C. Swett, manager of the Time Inc. Education Department, presented the awards. The winners: Cooper Union (in New York City) for the most improved alumni magazine and Lakeland College (in Sheboygan, Wis.) for the most impressive mail campaign.

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