The Reader's Digest: April, 1946: Volume 48, Number 288

Pleasantville, NY: The Reader's Digest Association, Inc, 1946. Presumed First Edition, First printing thus. Wraps. Fair.. 168 pages. Some wear and discoloration around staples. Cover has some wear, scuffing, and soiling. Some page discoloration. Marginal pencil marks on page 59 noted. Reader's Digest is an American general-interest family magazine, published ten times a year. Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, it is now headquartered in Midtown Manhattan. The magazine was founded in 1920, by DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Wallace. For many years, Reader's Digest was the best-selling consumer magazine in the United States. According to Mediamark Research (2006), Reader's Digest reaches more readers with household incomes of $100,000+ than Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Inc. combined. The magazine was started in 1922 by DeWitt Wallace while he was recovering from shrapnel wounds received in World War I. Wallace had the idea to gather a sampling of favorite articles on many subjects from various monthly magazines, sometimes condensing and rewriting them, and to combine them into one magazine.Since its inception, Reader's Digest has maintained a conservative and anti-Communist perspective on political and social issues. Mr. Wallace's continuing correct assessment of what the potential mass-market audience wanted to read led to rapid growth. By 1929, the magazine had 290,000 subscribers. The first international edition was published in the United Kingdom in 1938. By the 40th anniversary of Reader's Digest, there were 40 international editions, in 13 languages and Braille, and it was the largest-circulating journal in Canada, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Peru and other countries, with a total international circulation of 23 million.The magazine's format for several decades consisted of 30 articles per issue (one per day), along with a vocabulary page, a page of "Amusing Anecdotes" and "Personal Glimpses", two features of funny stories entitled "Humor in Uniform" and "Life in these United States", and a lengthier article at the end, usually condensed from a published book. These were all listed in the Table of Contents on the front cover. Each article was prefaced by a small, simple line drawing. In recent years, however, the format has greatly evolved into flashy, colorful eye-catching graphics throughout, and many short bits of data interspersed with full articles. The Table of Contents is now contained inside. The first "Word Power" column of the magazine was published in the January 1945 edition, written by Wilfred J. Funk. In December 1952 the magazine published "Cancer by the Carton", a series of articles that linked smoking with lung cancer. This first brought the dangers of smoking to public attention which, up to then, had ignored the health threatsThe periodical has a global circulation of 10.5 million, making it the largest paid circulation magazine in the world. The magazine is compact, with its pages roughly half the size of most American magazines'. Hence, in the summer of 2005, the U.S. edition adopted the slogan: "America in your pocket."