WHETHER they buy the magazine on newsstands or receive a subscription through the mail, most of TIME'S readers should have the next two issues in their hands much earlier than usual. Editors, writers, correspondents and researchers will all be working a stepped-up schedule designed to deliver next week's issue, and the final news of the campaign, before the polls close. The magazine that would normally be delivered the following week will go to press a day and a half after the election. It should reach a majority of readers before week's end.

The Cover: Collage by Romare Bearden.

TIME'S cover artists often find themselves spending long hours, even days, devising a plan of attack, a theme that will give some added insight to their work. Romare Bearden, 54, had no such problem. Although he was born in Charlotte, N.C., he has lived in Manhattan most of the past 50 years, and he has strong feelings about the expanding troubles of his adopted city. After discussing his first cover assignment with TIME'S editors on the 25th floor of the TIME and LIFE Building in Manhattan, Bearden happened to look out of the window just before he left for his studio. His worries about New York added an artistic distortion to what he saw. "The buildings were full of lights," he remembers. "I saw them toppling about the mayor."

Buildings, police, slum kids, street crowds and the mayor--Bearden worked them all into the jigsaw combination of photomontage and pasteup collage that has become his personal style. It is a style he developed after years of study under such teachers as Satirist George Grosz and at Manhattan's Art Students League, and he uses it with remarkable versatility (TIME, Oct. 27, 1967). With it, he has portrayed the varied aspects of the world he has known--from Deep South sharecropper farms to the Harlem neighborhoods, where he spent his youth and later tried his hand at professional songwriting. As a Negro, Bearden insists that there is no particular significance in the fact that so many of his subjects have been Negroes. "My subject is people. They just happen to turn out to be Negro," he says. Still, he pictures them with such special feeling and skill that their portraits have been shown in galleries across the U.S. and Europe; they are in the collections of Princeton University, Atlanta University, Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum.

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