TO OUR READERS

By BRUCE HALLETT PRESIDENT

Loyal TIME readers have found many uses for our covers. Collectors have wallpapered bathrooms with them, blown them up into posters, stuck them into time capsules as mementos for their children. But few took so seriously the idea of TIME as the first draft of history as did the late U.S. Army Colonel Robert Carter, who wanted his draft signed. This week Sotheby's will auction off 1,925 autographed TIME covers that Carter collected until he died in 1975. Through pleading letters, well-placed intermediaries and sheer doggedness, Carter tracked down artists, astronauts, athletes and war criminals--everyone from Jimmy Hoffa to Winston Churchill. "After his retirement, he started collecting very aggressively," says Elizabeth Muller of Sotheby's books and manuscripts department. "It was an ingenious way to collect autographs with something that was relatively inexpensive."

The first few were easy enough: three members of Carter's West Point class of 1919 made TIME's cover, and all gladly signed. The colonel accumulated old copies of the magazine, scouring libraries that were throwing out back issues once they had transferred them to microfilm. He wrote letters, even sometimes sent the cover subject a gift as an enticement to sign. Among those who took the bait: Pablo Picasso, Joseph R. McCarthy, Herbert Hoover, Charles de Gaulle, Chiang Kai-shek, Andy Warhol, Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio, Hopalong Cassidy (actor William Boyd) and all four Marx Brothers.

When a racehorse appeared, Carter got the owner to sign. When TIME ran a photo of a basset hound, Carter went to a kennel and took a paw print. In 1958, when seven Democratic presidential hopefuls, including Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson, turned up on the cover together, Carter got to all of them. Harry Truman signed three times, giving Carter good-humored hell for having built his collection on "such a prejudiced, pragmatic and purblind publication as TIME."

The collection, which Sotheby's thinks will bring in between $18,000 and $27,000, will be offered in 17 lots, each containing as many as 433 covers. Only one lot contains a single cover: that of Marilyn Monroe, which is expected to fetch as much as $1,500. Jackie Kennedy might have been promising were it not for the suspicion that in her case the cover was signed by a White House secretary.