Some TIME readers are sentimental and send us cards at Christmas. A few are even smitten enough to mail valentines to their favorite writers. But Donald Lehnus, an associate professor of library science, recently set an epistolary precedent. Quite unsolicited, he mailed us his 156-page computer analysis of 2,814 TIME cover subjects from 1923 to 1977, a scholarly study chockablock with statistical tables and chronological comparisons.

Lehnus, who teaches at the University of Puerto Rico, spent eight months on his project. His starting point was Faces in the News, a booklet published by TIME in 1976 that showed all the magazine's covers since House Speaker Joe Cannon's inaugurating appearance March 3, 1923. Lehnus then tracked down biographical information on each of the subjects, fed them into computer memory banks and cross-referenced them to a fare-thee-well.

Among his discoveries: the woman who has appeared most on the covers is the Virgin Mary (10 times). The only First Ladies not to appear were Florence Harding and Bess Truman. Henry Kissinger was on 15 covers; Jesus Christ was right behind him with 14. The youngest cover subject was the baby Jesus; the oldest, Amos Alonzo Stagg, 96.

Nearly all early TIME covers featured a single human subject, but in recent years the magazine's editors, feeling a growing need to highlight issues as well, have picked more "topic" covers. Editorial perceptions of the importance of the presidency have also changed. Herbert Hoover rated only four TIME covers, none of them during his one term as President. But in a 2 1/2-year term, Gerald Ford appeared 19 times. The unchallenged winner of the cover sweepstakes: Richard Nixon, who appeared 53 times in a 23-year-span.

For TIME'S editors, the Lehnus study provided provocative reading and, as Managing Editor Ray Cave observed, a lifetime of winning bar bets (The first Man of the Year? Charles A. Lindbergh. Only basketball player? Oscar Robertson. First woman? Eleanora Duse).

His next: a Spanish translation of the Dewey decimal classification system.

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