It was the appearance of two characters named Hannifin and Eisendrath in a recently published espionage novel called The Spy Trap that first quickened our interest. As the plot of The Spy Trap thickened, more and more characters sharing the names of TIME staff members began to turn up in the book. Reporter-Researcher Sara Collins (now Sara C. Medina), for instance, is a correspondent for an American press syndicate in the book; "Heiskell" is a Spy Trap code word and also the name of Time Inc.'s chairman of the board. Author Burton Graham provided the explanation: While he was working on the thriller in an isolated town in southern Spain in 1971, his only contact with the outside world was through his weekly edition of TIME. Thus whenever he needed a name, he simply appropriated one from our masthead (he borrowed a total of 16).

This was not the first time that TIME masthead names have appeared in a literary context. In William Saroyan's comedy Love's Old Sweet Song, a door-to-door magazine salesman recites our 1940 roster of editors and researchers as part of a TIME subscription sales pitch to his potential customers -- whose response is somewhat less than enthusiastic. Novelist P.G. Wodehouse proved to be a masthead reader too. In the 1955 Christmas issue of Punch, he published a poetic catalogue of our editorial staffers, including then-Managing Editor Roy Alexander: "How very much I would enjoy,/ To call Roy Alexander 'Roy'/ And hear him say 'Hullo, dear boy!' "

Something about our masthead (borrowed from the nautical, meaning "the place for the display of flags") intrigued a 1955 New Yorker writer as well; he noticed that the names of our 62 researchers composed the largest block in the list and surmised that the presence in the TIME offices of all those women -- with names like Harriet Ben Ezra, Quinera Sarita King and Yi Ying Sung -- must have been "pulse-quickening."

Perhaps the name that caught the imagination of outside writers more than any other was that of Science Reporter-Researcher Fortunata Sydnor Trapnell, who for years claimed the longest name on the masthead. She extended her lead by five letters in 1966, when she married and became Fortunata Sydnor Vanderschmidt. In a typographic economy drive of 1969 -- our staff, and our masthead, had grown larger -- she agreed to cooperate and is now listed merely as F. Sydnor Vanderschmidt.

The less distinctive name of Peter Mathews first materialized on our masthead in 1924 under the title of Weekly Contributor. He wrote articles, answered letters from TIME readers, and even appeared in a now defunct TIME column called Miscellany on more than one occasion. The truth is that Peter Mathews was an amiable figment of the imagination, the ghostliest writer on our staff, and in 1960 his name left the masthead forever.

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