TIME'S map and chart department recognizes no boundaries. It is located in a room filled with bedspread-size charts, atlases as big as coffee tables and shelves full of materials dealing with such diverse subjects as tennis elbow, wine prices and the geography of the moon. "We try to focus on the main point and dramatize it symbolically," says Jere Donovan, who heads the department and has been a TIME cartographer since 1951.

For his updated maps of the Arab-Israel war in this week's World section, Donovan worked from files sent to him by TIME correspondents, who could be no more precise about the location of the front lines than were the Arab and Israeli briefing officers in rear areas. "A map has to be continuously nourished until it becomes a useful tool," he explains, "and, like a written story, revised until it makes sense."

Also a member of the maps team is Walter Hortens, who was taught cartography while serving with a topographic battalion in North Africa during World War II before going to work as a technical illustrator. Hortens drew the maps that appeared in TIME during the first two weeks of Middle East fighting and applied his skills this week to the Science section chart that shows the path of the Kohoutek comet.

Both Donovan and Hortens depend on Joseph Arnon, who also was a map maker--for the British-sponsored survey of Palestine, and subsequently Israel, from 1942 to 1956. Within a few months after Arnon joined TIME 13 years ago, he introduced the time-saving technique of hand-setting type on maps and charts, which replaced the hand-lettering process.

Researchers Isabel Lenkiewicz and Adrianne Jucius compile all the information for the maps and charts. Lenkiewicz majored in cartography and geography in college but stresses that "there are no schools where you can really study journalistic cartography. It's much more important to be interested in a wide variety of subjects than to know how to draw a map." Jucius and Lenkiewicz also deal with telephone callers requesting special geographical information. One caller posed a question that no one minded answering: "Are you the guys who make complicated things simple?"

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