THE flag should never be displayed with the union down save as a signal of dire distress." Public Law No. 623, Sec. 4, Par. (a).

On page 50 of this issue, TIME'S readers will find an advertisement showing the Stars and Stripes with the union down. But the message is not one of distress. It is, instead, an unusual plea for a generous sort of patriotism. It also offers the little-known story of how and why the Danes have been celebrating our Fourth of July for the past 57 years. The ad is the work of a smallish New York agency, Savitt Tobias Balk, Inc., whose concern in this case is to sell not a product but an idea.

In 1922, TIME'S founders believed that ideas should actually leap off the page into the reader's mind, and the editors continue to live by that notion. TIME'S advertisers, too, have tried to tell their stories with verve and vibrancy. But we wondered what might happen if an advertising agency could feel free to talk about anything it chose--to turn its creative energy loose on any topic except a product.

To find out, we invited the nation's agencies to be the guests of TIME'S pages. Each week for 50 weeks, TIME will run free of charge a full-page ad and an adjoining column prepared by an agency on any subject of its choosing, whether it be the country, the world, peace, poverty, society, itself. The response has been rapid and abundant. One agency launched a contest among its 13 offices around the world. At another agency, the president decided to make sure of the excellence of its offering by doing it himself.

We expect that the subjects discussed will often seem familiar. But we believe that they will be spiced with pungent viewpoints. We hope to see inventive use of the printed page. We hope to be amused, annoyed, brought up short, gain new understanding. Most of all, we expect the unexpected.

The Cover: a three-dimensional illustration by Dennis Wheeler. The work is a fig leaf with a zipper, revealing two cast members of Oh! Calcutta!, the latest and most explicit example of theater in the nude. To Wheeler, the three elements--the leaf of Eden, the ubiquitous modern mechanism, the stark young bodies --symbolize the erotic renaissance that is the subject of TIME'S story.

The cover is Wheeler's sixth in less than a year. His first was Nov. 8, 1968, illustrating President Johnson's announcement of the bombing halt. The others included France's De Gaulle and the money crisis (Nov. 29, 1968), conglomerates (March 7, 1969), the military under attack (April 11, 1969), and the Communist summit (June 13, 1969). Recently, Wheeler received a copy of this last cover from a cousin working in South Korea. All the leaders' faces had been brushed with ink, though the text remained unchanged. Under Korea's anti-Communist laws, sample copies of magazines must be shown to the Ministry of Culture and Information, which decreed a partial blackout for TIME'S 5,000 subscribers there.

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