Word: digestable
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...