As early as 1924 it reproduced a story linking tobacco consumption to premature death it would return to the theme often, notably in 1952 with an article headlined “Cancer By the Carton”. A representative example, from 1991, sees Dick Francis rub shoulders with Barbara Taylor Bradford and Bernard Cornwell.īut the magazine has a noble history of campaigning-against syphilis, for instance, and in favour of organ donation. Perhaps its least lovely innovation was the condensed book, which packed abridgements of several bestsellers into a single hardback volume.
#READERS DIGEST WORDPOWER HOW TO#
To its critics, Reader’s Digest has long been a corny compendium of real-life survival stories, “points to ponder” and suggestions for self-improvement (such as how to enrich your vocabulary, or “word power”). Nothing seemed quite so symbolic of its advocacy of suburban family values, meanwhile, as the company’s move from Manhattan to the village of Pleasantville in New York State. Typical of the magazine’s hostility to communism was the publication in 1941 of an essay by Max Eastman-a political activist who once revered Karl Marx-with the memorable title “Socialism Doesn’t Jibe with Human Nature”. The name is synonymous, too, with right-of-centre politics. Or if not that, mailshots for prize draws, promising “the sooner you reply, the more money you could win”.
Within seven years they had more than 200,000 subscribers-a figure that would eventually grow to 18m, in 22 languages and across 40 countries.Ī century on from that debut, and almost 1,200 issues later, to say the words Reader’s Digest is to conjure an image of idle moments in dentists’ waiting rooms. There will be no 2008 Word Power Challenge.Undeterred, Wallace set up in a Greenwich Village basement, alongside his wife, Lila Acheson Wallace, and with occasional help from the patrons of the speakeasy upstairs.