Word: lila
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...Formula. Wally ("I gave him that name," says Lila Bell, "and allow others to use it") claims that there is no hard & fast recipe. Says he: "I simply hunt for things that interest me, and if they do, I print them." One of his frequent contributors, Author Louis Bromfield, puts it differently. He thinks the magazine's main appeal is to "intellectual mediocrity" and that Wallace's own "strictly average" mind "completely reflects the mentality of his readers," who like the Digest because "it requires no thought or perception...
...Vulgar?" "Whatever Is New for Women Is Wrong") and in the stockpile he had condensed in St. Paul; the rest he got from magazines in Manhattan's Public Library. When he visited editors to ask permission to reprint articles, Wallace was so shy that he sometimes took Lila along. Editors readily gave him permission to reprint especially as Wallace assured them that the Digest would carry no ads, would therefore be no competition that...
Since Wallace believed that the magazine's principal appeal would be to women, he headed the list of editors with "Lila Bell Acheson," and added, along with his own, the names of two women who had nothing to do with the magazine. For an office, he rented a basement room under a speakeasy at 1 Minetta Lane, in Greenwich Village. When the first issue of 5,000 copies arrived from the Pittsburgh printer, Wallace hired barflies from the speakeasy to help him and Lila wrap and address them. They piled the mail sacks into a taxicab, took them...
...future was on them before they knew it. The mail poured in from subscribers, bringing ecstatic testimonials. Wrote "L.M.W." from Pennsylvania: "Its contents seem like nuggets of gold." "The Reader's Digest," announced Editor Lila Bell Acheson in the second issue, "is successful beyond all anticipations." The fifth month brought a crisis; the Digest couldn't pay the printer, and Wallace was plunged in gloom. At first Lila was crushed by these moods, which would "just descend on him like a black cloud. It was all new to me-it just isn't in my nature...
When Wallace bought a huge old desk and moved it-with a secretary-into their already cramped quarters, Lila rented an empty pony shed next to the garage for $10 a month, and turned it into the Digest's office. When Ralph Henderson, a jungle-born son of missionaries, dropped in from nearby White Plains to see what the little magazine was like, the Wallaces hired him as business manager, soon made him an editor. They later hired Harold Lynch, an assistant Episcopal rector, to handle the money. The Digest soon outgrew the pony shed, and spread all over...