When Gerald Scarfe announced himself in the outer office of John Kenneth Galbraith at Harvard, the professor's secretary gasped: "Aren't you the artist who did the Beatles?" Rather pleased at the recognition, Scarfe admitted that he was indeed the creator of the papier-mache figures that brightened TIME'S cover on Sept. 22. To his dismay, the worried young lady whisked off, saying that she had to "warn" her boss. When Scarfe was finally ushered in to meet his subject, the long, lean economist rumbled: "The last thing I want to give you is artistic direction, but are you going to do the same sort of thing to me?"

Scarfe evaded the issue. While Galbraith went about his work, Scarfe sketched, filling two pads with impressions. Then he checked into Boston's Ritz-Carlton Hotel carrying a bag of flour, a pile of Boston newspapers and a roll of wire. "The staff of the hotel must have thought I was mad," he says. "The shreddings on the floor looked like bread crumbs. They probably thought I was cooking in the room."

With his three-foot-high caricature half done, Scarfe moved to Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel where he applied the finishing touches, dressing the completed figure in a shirt and sports jacket lent by Galbraith. As he carried it into a crowded elevator on his way downstairs to a taxi, a little old lady tapped him on the shoulder and asked: "Is that John Galbraith?" "I was delighted," says Scarfe. "It was the first time anyone had seen it."

Scarfe's figures of the Beatles still repose in Madame Tussaud's waxworks in London. Aware that a similar long-lasting fate might await his Galbraith sculpture, TIME'S editors asked the professor if they could keep the jacket, which he had bought at Horton's of Dublin. Indeed they could, said the Scots-descended economist, "for one hundred dollars!" TIME sent a check posthaste.

ON a different artistic front, TIME'S map department, directed by Robert M. Chapin Jr., maintains a Viet Nam "war map" on which deployment of troops, weapons and ships is shifted daily.

For the Hue map (p. 37), Correspondent Glenn Troelstrup made on-the-spot diagrams of the street fighting. These were air-expressed to New York and translated by Cartographer Vincent Puglisi onto a U.S. Army street map of the city that had been wheedled from Pentagon sources.

Chapin has been charting and mapping wars, space shots and economic trends for TIME for more than 30 years. Working with him and Puglisi is Cartographer Jere Donovan, who recently created a detailed map of the Berlin Wall that was widely copied, even by German publications.

But for all the careful research that makes the products of his map room so accurate, says Chapin, he must sometimes rely on informed guesswork. He remembers a week during World War II when a cryptic cable arrived from John Hersey, then a TIME correspondent, from Honolulu: "If Chapin is a wise man he will know what to map in the Pacific this week." Chapin studied a Pacific map to find what might make him wise. The only possibility, he concluded, was the Solomon Islands. When U.S. Marines invaded Guadalcanal, TIME'S map was ready to go to press.

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