What kind of a day was February 28, 1969? An ordinary one in the life of The New York Times, but even an ordinary day at The Times crackles with excitement and tension as the news of the world flows into the paper's block-long newsroom: Nixon meets with DeGaulle in Paris . . . an earthquake hits Portugal and Morocco . . . a military coup threatens Syria . . . former President Eisenhower develops pneumonia... Ruth Adler asked reporters, editors, copyboys and pressmen to keep notes on February 28 (a day picked at random), and she has pulled them all together into an extraordinary hour-by-hour description of how a single issue of the paper is created. She begins with the foreign correspondents getting an filing their stories from stations around the world and end as the last paper rolls off the presses at 3 A.M. In between, the process of putting out a great newspaper is recorded, full of personalities and anecdotes, inside information, and bits of Times lore. In the best journalistic tradition, Miss Adler has written a book that is a masterpiece of reporting–lucid, fascinating, informative.