Every doting parent has experienced the special challenges of photographing a baby. Baby isn't very helpful. But when such a photograph is needed for the cover of TIME, the challenges grow exponentially. First, the professional photographer, unlike the parent, has to find a baby. This week's cover photographer, Gordon Munro, consulted Marge McDermott, a New York City talent agent for the carriage set, and told her exactly what he wanted: "A baby who seems to be almost newborn but is also beginning to look like everybody's idea of a baby. And I want to look at as many babies with as many different personalities as possible." McDermott sent eight of her 200 available clients to the photographer, who took Polaroid pictures. Then he and TIME's art directors winnowed the list to three. One, says Munro, was a happy, bubbling child who never stopped laughing; the second was a preternaturally wise, grown-up infant; the third, a classically pretty baby-food-ad type.

The three were photographed for three hours on a Formica-covered plank in Munro's New York City studio. The session, which cost $75 per hour per baby, was unstructured. "The babies did whatever they felt like," says Munro. "If they fell over, we didn't sit them up. If they dribbled, we didn't clean them up. The hardest part was getting their mothers to leave them alone."

TIME's editors reviewed the hundreds of pictures from that session, along with similar efforts by four other photographers. "We got wonderful pictures from all five," says Art Director Rudolph Hoglund. "But we were looking for that one baby with just the right expression and gesture." The editors' choice: six-month-old Lisa Harap of Queens Village, N.Y., Munro's "wise" baby. Lisa becomes the youngest identifiable living person ever to appear on TIME's cover (the oldest: 96-year-old Football Coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, in 1958).

The cover story itself was supervised by Senior Editor Jim Atwater, who has supervised six children of his own. It was written by Senior Writer Otto Friedrich, a father of five, who is now watching his first granddaughter, Julia, 2, grow up. "Being a grandparent lets you relive the emotions of parenthood, but at a remove," Friedrich says. "And it really revives your interest." His interest in the young extends to the world of books. He has collaborated with his wife Priscilla on nine published children's volumes. One of them, The Easter Bunny That Overslept, a classic for 26 years, was reissued this spring, suitably reillustrated for Julia's generation. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.