The Press: The Magic Touch

It dispenses more medical advice than the A.M.A. Journal, more ribaldry than Boccaccio, more jokes than Joe Miller, more animal stories than Uncle Remus, more faith than Oral Roberts. It is published in 13 languages and 40 editions, not to mention one for school children and two for the blind.* Convicts in U.S. prisons get 50,000 copies a month free. It goes to more than 100 countries and outsells all other monthly magazines in Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Finland, Italy, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Uruguay, Venezuela—and, of course, the U.S. Last week the Reader’s Digest—circ. 22.8 million—proudly observed its 40th birthday with a 300-page anniversary issue.

The fat February Digest of 1962 reproduced the cover of its first issue and reprised its first reprinted article, “How to Keep Young Mentally,” which encouraged charter subscribers to “Observe! Remember! Compare!” Another feature of this first issue, also reproduced, was a varied collection of homilies, designed to plump out a page and satisfy the public appetite for bite-size sermons. Examples:

> Billy Sunday—Try praising your wife, even if it does frighten her at first.

> Herbert Hoover—We have but one police force, the American woman.

> Rev. B. C. Preston—A woman is as old as she looks. A man is old when he stops looking.

> Homer Rodeheaver—One cigarette will kill a cat.

At 40, the Reader’s Digest has no small statistics. Merely to print each U.S. edition (circ. 13.5 million) takes a full month. The Digest sells more Christmas gift subscriptions—2,000,000, including renewals—than most magazines have readers. Each year it fields some 1,200,000 unsolicited contributions from readers, pays for some of those accepted at the uncommon rate of $1 a word.

No Throat Clearing. For all the Digest’s fabulous growth, its editorial formula has not significantly changed since birth. To Digest editors, the magazine is an “invention” that can be refined, improved and expanded—not changed. But since it reflects the growing sophistication of its sources, the Digest is now a notably slicker product than the one founded in 1922, on 4,000 borrowed dollars, by a Minnesota minister’s son with an infallible instinct for middlebrow tastes. More than anything else, though, the Reader’s Digest is a monument to DeWitt Wallace’s reading habits—multiplied 22 million times.

The Digest began life by compiling its entire contents from other periodicals and nurturing an evangelical ambition “to inform, inspire and entertain.” For its first eight years, the magazine subsisted on previously printed wares, simplified and condensed to accommodate Wallace’s notion of suitable brevity or a reader’s attention span. Even today, the Digest frequently shears the lead paragraph from reprinted articles, on the assumption that the author is only clearing his throat. Both in selecting and cutting, Wallace’s hand was sure from the start. With only minor amendment, much of the February 1922 issue’s table of contents could pass a Digest reader’s muster today: “Keep Well” (an unexceptionable appeal from President Wilson’s physician reprinted from Good Housekeeping); “Wanted—Motives for Motherhood,” from Outlook.

Dike Breached. But as the Digest’s readership grew, so did Wallace’s urge to print more surefire Digest titles than other magazines were supplying him. In 1930 he published the Digest’s first original article—a study of the effect of music on workaday efficiency—and the dike was breached. From then on, the number of original contributions to the Digest—a fair share of them “planted” first in other magazines—crept steadily upward. Today, they constitute 70% of every issue.

There have been other alterations. In the beginning, the Digest carried no ads, largely to curry favor with its magazine sources, who did. But in 1954, after polling readers for permission, the Digest opened its U.S. edition to advertising, fielded orders for 1,107 pages within two weeks of the announcement. Last year, without benefit of liquor or tobacco ads, which it scorns in the U.S. edition, the Digest’s gross ad revenue was $65 million. It also collected in excess of $60 million in circulation revenue. From time to time, the parent Digest has launched prosperous offspring, among them the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club, biggest in the U.S., and last year it acquired a record club that sold some $20 million worth of platters. From all sources, the Digest grossed a total of $155 million last year. Its profits are not published since the Digest is about as privately held as a company can be; it is controlled by DeWitt Wallace and his wife Lila.

“If Wally Likes It.” Today, as the world’s most widely distributed magazine, the Digest wields an editorial force that often takes strange forms. Its preoccupation with sex might make even a Confidential reader blush. The Digest delights in double-entendre page-enders or fillers, rarely misses the chance to reprint notably daring sex lore from outside authorities. In 1957, for example, it condensed part of a book (A Woman Doctor Looks at Love and Life) that explicitly catalogued coital climaxes and advised disconsolate bedfellows that satisfaction “can take five years to perfect.”

In gauging the tastes of their vast audience, DeWitt and Lila Wallace pay little heed to the Digest’s critics. Nor do Digest editors. “If Wally likes it,” an editor said some years ago, when the magazine had a mere 12 million subscribers, “12 million other people will like it. It’s like that.” In Chappaqua, 30 miles from New York, the Digest staff works in a big building that looks like the high school of a particularly prosperous suburb, listens to canned music drifting through the halls, and departs the premises—on orders from Wallace—at 4 o’clock sharp every afternoon, confident that the boss, at 72, has not lost his magic touch.

* In Braille (in five languages) and on records (twelve LPs per issue).