Candidate No. 3 I

In six years, the book review section of the Sunday New York Times (circ. 1,161,174) has had four editors. For one reason or another, all eventually parted company with exacting, hard-riding Lester Markel, longtime (26 years) Sunday editor of the Times (TIME, March 8, 1948). Since August, able Editor Markel has been his own book editor, while he hunted for a man who could fill the job.

After disconsolately considering 30 candidates, Markel suddenly thought of a man who had not even applied. Last week Sunday Editor Markel got his man: Francis Brown, 45, an Old Times Hand and, for the last four years, a senior editor of TIME.

Graduating from Dartmouth ('25), Brown had a try at banking in Detroit, returned to Dartmouth to teach history, got a Ph.D. in history from Columbia, and published a biography of a minor American Revolutionary figure (Joseph Hawley of Massachusetts). After a. spell as associate editor of the Times's monthly news review, Current History, Brown moved over to Lester Markel's Sunday department in 1936. He was assistant Sunday editor when he left, in 1945, to join TIME, where he has been editor of the Hemisphere, Canadian and Latin America sections.

In the book-reviewing business, which is not generally noted for its high pay, the Times's book section is an oasis of prosperity, if not brilliance. But Lester Markel knows, more intimately than most, that it is not yet doing a first-rate job. The Sunday book section, now frankly a "news book review," tries to balance its major reviews with quick looks at minor books, literary letters from overseas, interviews with big-name authors and book-trade gossip. New Editor Brown expects to do it better. Said Markel hopefully last week: "We'll get along. Brownie knows the kind of fellow I am--not too easy to understand, a little tough to work with."

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