First book reviewed in TIME:
Black Oxen, written by Gertrude Atherton, great-grandniece of Ben Franklin, was the first book reviewed in TIME.  According to the review, the book was about "society, sophisticates, and a highly modernized fountain of youth."

First writer on TIME's cover:
Joseph Conrad appeared on TIME's sixth cover, April 7, 1923. George Bernard Shaw was the second writer to be on TIME's cover. He appeared on the Dec. 24, 1923, issue with the description "Mocking, mordant, misanthropic."

First woman writer on TIME's cover:
Amy Lowell, poet, critic, and Keats biographer.

Writer on the most covers:
Eugene O'Neill was pictured on four TIME covers from 1924 to 1946.

Who was J.F.?
During the first couple of years of TIME, a half-century before TIME used bylines, the initials J.F. appeared at the end of many book reviews.  Who was the mysterious J.F.? A Yale classmate of TIME's founders Hery Luce and Briton Hadden, John Farrar was an organizing member of PEN and later began the publishing houses Farrar and Rinehart, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  Farrar contributed his first-person reviews gratis as a favor to his old friends.

Who reviewed books for TIME?
Because TIME did not use bylines until the early seventies, we can't always be sure about who wrote what.  We do know that TIME's  early reviewers included Stephen Vincent Benet, John Farrar, Thomas Matthews, Robert Cantwell, Nigel Dennis, John Skow, Max Gissen, Robert Fitzgerald, and Whittaker Chambers (who was responsible for the 1946 review of George Orwell's Animal Farm.)