N Hong Kong last week, some 250 government officials, diplomats and businessmen gathered at the Crown Colony's Hilton Hotel to help us celebrate an event that is becoming more and more frequent for TIME: the opening of a new printing plant. For the past 15 years, the magazine's Asian editions have been printed in Tokyo, and distributed by air to readers in Hong Kong and throughout Southeast Asia. In some cases, that meant a time-consuming haul of more than 4,000 miles. With the new plant in full operation (at least 100,000 copies of the magazine each week), Hong Kong area readers will get their TIME considerably earlier than before.

Over the past ten years, TIME has vastly expanded its printing operations in order to keep pace with rapidly rising readership round the world. In 1959, when circulation was approaching 3,000,000 we were able to serve our readers with five printing plants in the U.S. and four abroad. Since then, our circulation has grown to 5,300,000, which requires no fewer than 15 printing and distribution centers round the world. In the U.S., we have plants in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Atlanta, Dallas, Old Saybrook, Conn., and Albany, N.Y. Abroad, the load is carried by Paris, Tokyo, Melbourne, Montreal, Auckland, Panama City, London and now Hong Kong. Early next year, there will be a 16th plant, in Vancouver, B.C., and sometime during the year a circulation to top almost 5,600,000, a gain of 12% over 1969. For the first six months of this year, our circulation has already grown by more than 300,000 worldwide, while every one of TIME'S 85 editions is enjoying an increase in advertising pages and revenues.

In the U.S., ad revenue rose $3,700,000; abroad it grew by $2,100,000. That brought total revenues to $60.7 million, which represents a 10.5% jump over the same period last year.

The Cover: Painted wax sculpture by Harry Jackson. A Chicagoan, Jackson, 45, followed Horace Greeley's advice not once but many times. At the age of 14, he ran away from home to seek his fortune in a romantic place called Cody, Wyoming. There he learned the hard realities of a cowpoke's life until World War II and service in the U.S. Marines (Purple Heart at Tarawa). After the war and art studies in Europe, he headed West again, where he still spends part of each year on a ranch near Lost Cabin, Wyo. His brilliant paintings and bronzes--of stampeding steers, dust-churning ponies and lean-featured frontiersmen --have the same quality of rough-chiseled permanence that epitomizes another kind of artist, John Wayne, our cover subject this week. As Cinema Critic Stefan Kanfer, who wrote the story, puts it: "The usherettes and the popcorn machines may have gone, but John Wayne remains. He has endured in an industry notorious for its instability."

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