When TIME first appeared on newsstands in March 1923, not even the brash, energetic 24-year-olds who had co-founded the magazine, Henry R. Luce and Briton Hadden, could have predicted that it would spawn one of the world's largest communications empires. As Time Inc. Editor in Chief Henry Anatole Grunwald has noted, "Not many institutions launched 60 years ago have survived, thrived and become part of folklore."

To mark the magazine's 60th anniversary, TIME this week is bringing out a separate, special issue that recalls the years since 1923, perhaps the most astonishing six decades in history. Now in the mail to subscribers, the issue is the largest ever produced by TIME, with 86 editorial pages. It contains condensed versions of stories that appeared in the magazine, organized into six categories: War and Peace, This Turbulent World, Triumphs of the Spirit, The Wealth of Nations, Art and Its Rewards, and Frontiers of Science.

Senior Writer Otto Friedrich, who supervised the selection and editing of the historic articles, had the formidable task of sifting through more than 3,000 issues of TIME. Some choices were easy: the Crash of '29, the start of World War II, the fiery dawn of the nuclear age over Hiroshima. Others, involving popular trends and celebrities, were less so, if only because there were so many candidates. "Putting the book together was a little like cooking," says Friedrich. "We were always looking for the perfect balance of ingredients."

Researchers Eileen Chiu, Jane Furth, Villette Harris and Elizabeth D. Meyer spent five months helping him find the right words, while Picture Researcher Evelyn Merrin and the Time Inc. Picture Collection staff tracked down thousands of old photographs. As art director for the issue, Tom Bentkowski faced a particularly complex problem: recreating the typography and design that TIME used through the years. Some 300 format changes were fed into the magazine's computerized typesetting system, more than were required for the complete redesign of TIME in 1976.

Assistant Managing Editor Ronald Kriss, who directed the overall project, was struck by how often the magazine zeroed in on the big story. "When you try to pack the whole world into relatively few pages," says Kriss, "you're bound to miss now and again. But over the years, TIME has achieved a remarkable record in sensing early on what would be important not just next week, but a year or ten years or even 60 years later." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.