A letter from the PUBLISHER

ALDOUS HUXLEY once wrote that "good printing can create a valuable spiritual state in the reader." While we consider this more a thought to ponder than a principle to prove, TIME this week makes a major change in the interest of good printing. For the first time since early in TIME'S 40-year history, we have changed the magazine's body type--the type in which most of the editorial content is printed. Until this week, most of our columns have been printed in a variation of a type somewhat inappropriately called Old Style. Beginning with this issue, we will use Times Roman, designed for the Times of London by the noted expert on type, Britain's Stanley Morison. He set out to develop a type face that would be "masculine, English, direct, simple, and absolutely free from faddishness."

The new type is technically the same size as the old and has the same space between lines, but because of its design it appears to be bigger. It is blacker than Old Style and takes slightly more space (36 characters to a line instead of 40). To complement the new body type, we have changed the type used for headlines and captions. Picture captions, for example, were previously in Old Style and will now be in Spartan Medium. As in the past, some special text pieces, notably those we call "boxes," will frequently be printed in type that varies slightly from the body of the magazine when a variation seems appropriate.

While the type changes were prompted in part by esthetics, their main aim is readability. We wanted to make TIME easier on the eye.

IN his relatively short reign, Pope John XXIII caught the world's attention in a way that few of his predecessors had. Three times in that period of less than five years, his impact on world events made him a TIME cover subject: when he was named Pope, after he called the historic Ecumenical Council and as Man of the Year for 1962. This week's fourth TIME cover story on the 262nd Pope, based on the reporting of Rome Bureau Chief Robert E.

Jackson and Correspondent Robert B. Kaiser, with reaction reports from correspondents in Paris, Geneva, Brussels, Amsterdam, Bonn, London, Boston, Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles, was written against great deadline pressure by Religion Writer John T. Elson and edited by Senior Editor William Forbis. The cover itself is from the last publicly distributed photograph of John taken on May 25. He was recording a radio broadcast at the Vatican to the faith ful of the sanctuary of Piekary in Poland, a traditional message sent on the last Sunday of May each year. The next day he fell critically ill.

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