Reader's Digest

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Richard Digby-Junger

The moral obligation to save time has been a sovereign force in American culture since colonial days. Time saving took on added importance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when businessmen sought to standardize the performance of the country's growing industrial sector. This movement toward greater efficiency extended into personal lives as well, as people sought to maximize their own working and leisure time. An instant success that went on to become the most powerful vehicle for the printed word in the world, Reader's Digest was only one expression of the time-saving vogue when it was introduced in 1922. Printed in handy booklet form that made it suitable for slipping into a coat pocket or purse, Reader's Digest featured 31 articles, one for each day of the month, culled from leading magazines, "each article of enduring value and interest, in condensed and permanent form," as the magazine maintained.

Reader's Digest did not introduce the concept of sampling and condensing other publications. An American magazine called Littell's Living Age first reprinted periodical articles in 1844. Almost 50 years later, Literary Digest, founded by Isaac Kauffman Funk of Funk & Wagnalls fame, capitalized upon the success of a British periodical, Review of Reviews, and presented condensations of articles from American, Canadian, and European publications. The highbrow Literary Digest achieved a circulation of over one million by 1927, earning praise from Time magazine (another 1920s time-saving publication) as "one of the greatest publishing successes in history." But Literary Digest fell out of the reading public's good graces in 1936 when it incorrectly predicted that Franklin D. Roosevelt would lose in a landslide in one of the first national presidential preference polls. The magazine failed the following year, not long after Roosevelt was inaugurated for the second of his record four terms.

The less esoteric Reader's Digest was the brainchild of William Roy DeWitt Wallace (1889-1981), a Minnesota-born college dropout who, according to biographer Peter Canning, touted various "schemes and stunts" as a young man. While employed as a traveling salesman, Wallace would condense and memorize important facts from magazine articles on three-by-five slips of paper in an effort to impress customers. He suffered shrapnel injuries fighting in France in World War I and he read a variety of popular magazines and practiced condensing their articles while he recovered. His college professor father loaned him $300 and in January 1920 Wallace produced a 64-page prototype issue of Reader's Digest, complete with 31 articles from publications such as Ladies' Home Journal, McClure's, and Vanity Fair. Potential publishers--such as William Randolph Hearst--rejected the magazine's concept as interesting but without any commercial promise because of an assumed limited readership and Wallace's determination not to have illustrations or advertisements detract from the reading material in his magazine.

While searching for a publisher, Wallace met feminist reformer Lila Acheson (1887-1984). She was not looking for a husband so much as a business partner in life. She encouraged Wallace to publish Reader's Digest himself and helped him advertise and process the first subscription orders. The couple married in Pleasantville, New York, and with $5,000 in advance subscription orders established the Reader's Digest Association in the New York City suburb in 1921. Pleasantville became the headquarters of the Reader's Digest empire, as the first issue went out the following January. The magazine was an immediate success, capitalizing on self-education and self-confidence crazes then underway, a growing sense of national pride, and the omnipresent desire of readers to save time.

Except for a signature line drawing of a woman within a circle on the front cover, the drab text-only early Reader's Digest was issued without artwork or illustrations until November 1939. That drawing was removed in 1942 to be replaced by the magazine's table of contents. The front-cover table of contents became a trademark for Reader's Digest until May 1998, when it was moved inside the magazine its cover spot replaced by a photograph. A greater number of illustrations began appearing with articles in the 1970s and 1980s, giving the magazine a greater visual appeal. The Wallaces were able to support their publication on circulation revenues until the 1950s, using their financial freedom to espouse populist causes that other magazines were less willing to discuss. Eventually, however, a survey revealed that 80 percent of readers preferred advertising over increased subscription costs and advertisements began appearing in April 1955, generating as much as $91,000 per page by the 1980s. Tobacco advertisements, a mainstay for many periodicals, were never accepted and the first liquor advertisement did not appear in Reader's Digest until 1979; no advertisement has ever appeared on the last page of the magazine--an attractive picture or art reprint, suitable for coffee-table display, always graced the magazine's back cover. Many reprints came from the magazine's own collection of original art.