a new magazine was launched in New York. The elegant cover promised articles “of enduring value and interest, in condensed and compact form”. Its 64 pages, a pocket-size seven-and-a-half by five-and-a-half inches, were full of information and practical suggestions, extracted from other publications. The first item, “How to Keep Young Mentally”, offered a taste of two lasting preoccupations: lifelong learning and the rewards of being upbeat.
The venture was the brainchild of DeWitt Wallace, a 32-year-old former university drop-out from Minnesota. He had dreamed it up more than three years earlier, while recovering from shrapnel wounds sustained on the Western Front. Wallace had some form in publishing: in 1916 he had sold 100,000 copies of a pamphlet called “Getting the Most Out of Farming”. But 18 companies rejected his new idea, dismissing it as either dry or quaint.
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. 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.is to conjure an image of idle moments in dentists’ waiting rooms. Or if not that, mailshots for prize draws, promising “the sooner you reply, the more money you could win”.
But the magazine has a noble history of campaigning—against syphilis, for instance, and in favour of organ donation. 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”.