WE think a long time before deciding to add more editorial pages to the magazine. The amount of news we print remains constant through the year, though the number of advertising pages varies with the seasons. We prefer to stay compact--or "curt, clear and complete," as we used to say.

Some of our readers like to skip around among favorite sections, but a surprising number are still cover-to-cover readers. So, since everybody's time counts these days, we try to limit ourselves to providing one evening's worth of reading a week.

The result is a constant jostling for space among our editors, and the competition keeps our news stories lean: there is always more to tell than we have room for. This week we add a new section, and because we can no longer do so at the expense of existing sections, we are adding two news pages. For a long time we have been reporting more and more business news from abroad, as a prosperous Europe changes its tastes, markets and circumstances, and as new economic opportunities--and dangers--lurk or loom in Asia, Africa, Australia, Latin America.

We've told much, but barely tapped the subject. So this week we begin a new section called World Business.

The old section from which it sprang becomes U.S. Business. The editor of both is Robert Christopher, 38, whose competence in world business rests on two tours of Army duty in the Pacific as a Japanese-language officer, 2 1/2 years in Rome as a TIME correspondent, and five years as a foreign news writer for TIME.

NOT to be outdone, the new U.S.

Business section makes its debut with a spot-news cover on the bulls and bears of Wall Street. The progress of the bull market has been portrayed on TIME'S cover five times previously, beginning with a baby bull in 1948. A baby bear--just a friendly cub--first turned up, sliding down a falling graph, in the background of a 1958 cover.

Now that the twelve-year bull market is at an end, the bear has become a more formidable character on this week's cover. The story was written by Marshall Loeb, 33, with some feeling, since of the ten stock issues in which he has small holdings, three were among the 15 biggest losers in the current slide.

The painting is the work of our crash-cover champ, Artist Boris Chaliapin. He needed some swirling ticker tape to reproduce in the background, and so we sent downstairs to the Merrill Lynch office in our building for a few strands of cellulose acetate. The reply we got was typical of the impact of the week's news: "You can have all of it," said Broker Nicholas Bazarov.

"I don't want to remember anything that happened today."

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