There’s too much news these days, but then, well, there’s always been too much news. Over a century ago, after sustaining shrapnel wounds while fighting in WWI—and spending his recovery time reading a bunch of magazines—an American named DeWitt Wallace came up with an idea.
He thought his fellow Americans were overloaded—“Too many articles, too many words, too much junk—with the end result an almost insurmountable barrier between readers hungry for information and the information itself,” as Peter Canning put it in American Dreamers: The Wallaces and Reader's Digest—and he had figured out how to help: by creating an aggregated, single monthly source that would tell them everything they needed to know, and nothing more. In 1920, he made a prototype (at the beginning, Wallace would personally read through the month’s magazines at the New York Public Library, and type out the “digested” versions on a typewriter) but 18 publishers turned him down. It wasn’t until he met his soon-to-be wife, Lila Acheson, that the project got off the ground.
Acheson was confident that the idea would appeal to “restless housewives and newly liberated working girls,” and encouraged Wallace to self-publish, and after a direct mail campaign that secured some 1,500 subscribers and $5,000 in advance orders, that’s exactly they did.
The first issue of Reader’s Digest, published on February 5, 1922, aggregates and summarizes such articles as “How to Keep Young Mentally” and “Prison Facts” and “Whatever is New for Women is Wrong” and “Is the State too Vulgar?” (So it’s probably safe to say that overload isn’t the only thing that hasn’t changed in the last 100+ years.) It includes a “Word of Thanks” written by Acheson, which includes the four primary features of the publication:
1. Thirty-one articles each month—“one a day”—condensed from leading periodicals.
2. Each article of enduring value and interest—today, next month, or a year hence; such articles as one talks about and wishes to remember.
3. Compact form; easy to carry in the pocket and to keep for permanent reference.
4. A most convenient means of “keeping one’s information account open”—of reading stimulating articles on a wide variety of subjects.
It was a good idea indeed. By 1927, Reader’s Digest had 30,000 subscribers. By 1939, it had 3 million. By 1973, when DeWitt retired, it had 30 million. Now, though firmly past its heyday, it’s still the country’s “fourth largest-circulation magazine brand.” Not too shabby.
