By press time each week, our offices are piled high with paper --stories, newspapers, cables, galleys. An enormous number of words, only a small percentage of which see print, go into the preparation of every issue. Thus it seems almost daunting that the people who create and work with this instant library spend much of their leisure time putting together words on their own. At almost any time of year, a number of our staff are busy writing books or readying them for publication.

"A book provides the necessary antidote to weekly journalism. It's fun to have space for 100,000 words," says Senior Writer Robert Hughes, who is writing about the colonization of Australia by convicts in the 18th century. Correspondent Neil MacNeil turned to history in a recent monograph, The President's Medal, 1789-1977. For others, contemporary events have provided subjects: Associate Editor David Tinnin's forthcoming I, Terrorist examines the motivations of terrorists; Correspondent James Willwerth's new Badge of Madness is about the breakdown of one New York policeman.

Four staffers have just written first novels. Says Senior Editor Stefan Kanfer, whose book. The Eighth Sin, will appear this spring: "Every journalist is always writing a novel in his head because we are all self-dramatizing types." Associate Editor James Atwater drew on the trouble in Northern Ireland for Time Bomb; Writer Christopher Byron is completing The Holder of the Present, set in Greece; Contributor Richard Schickel's Another I, Another You, a love story about two divorced people, will be published in May.

Some of our authors chose to write about characters in real life. Senior Editor Otto Friedrich is working on a biography of Clover Adams, wife of the historian Henry Adams. For his forthcoming book on Truman Capote, Associate Editor Gerald Clarke conducted 200 interviews with his subject's friends and foes. Two staffers have written biographies drawn upon their reporting experience at TIME. Correspondent Bernard Diederich's Death of the Goat, due this spring, is about Dominican Republic Dictator Rafael Trujillo. Jerusalem Stringer Robert Slater has written a biography of Yitzhak Rabin, the former Israeli Premier. Says Slater: "When I told my little daughter that Rabin was also writing a book, she asked innocently. 'Oh, is he doing it about you?' "

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