The venture could be started on a shoestring precisely because it required no authors or editors.  [De Witt] Wallace simply went to the New York Public Library, and copied out by hand from other magazines his own abridged, adapted version of articles he thought would interest readers.  The editors of the original magazines considered the circulation of these brief versions to be free advertising.  With few exceptions, they gladly allowed Wallace to reprint them without charge.  The first issue, setting a patter which has changed very little, consisted of sixty-two pages (exclusive of the cover) and offered thirty-one articles.  […]

For about ten years the Digest followed Wallace’s simple, original procedure, searching other magazines for articles and stories to be adapted for its readers.  Then, by the inexorable law of pseudo-events, the Reader’s Digest began to spawn other pseudo-events.  Wallace himself later described this innovation as an “inevitable development, perhaps the most important in the Digest’s history.”  Like all great inventions, the idea was beautifully simple.  It was merely to “plant” a full-length article (“prepared under Reader’s Digest direction) in some other magazines, so it could afterward be digested in The Reader’s Digest.  The editors of the Digest would conceive a two page piece for their own magazine.  Instead of directly writing the two-page article themselves, they would commission an author to prepare on this topic a “full length” article — say five times the length of the predestined Digest abridgment.  This proposed article (sometimes before it was written) was then accepted by some other magazine, which would print it among its regular contents.  The Digest paid for the whole process, including the full – length original.  Here, of course, was perfect example of a literary pseudo-event .  The article was made to appear in The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, Holiday, The American Legionnaire, or the Rotarian, primarily in order that it might afterwards be reported in The Digest.

The motives behind this Reader’s Digest innovation was not clear.  Perhaps the energetic Wallace, now restless at remaining a dealer in secondhand articles, simply wanted to try manufacturing the original commodity.  The magazine’s official historian says it had become necessary.  Many of the leading magazines which had been fruitful sources of Digest material in the 1920s were now dead.  Therefore, material which in condensed form would be suitable for the peculiar tone and character of the Reader’s Digest was harder to find.

The new Digest formula required certain ideas in the originals which not always were found in adequate supply.  The very success of the Digest had created a need which could be satisfied only by insuring a steady flow of articles (pseudo-articles if necessary) written for the purpose of being digested.  Anyway, the differences between a pseudo-article and a spontaneous article would not appear in the skillfully digested product — just as the walls of Babylon on a movie set did not need to be solid so long as the photographed version made them look so.

Whatever the motives, the effect was plain enough.  The magazine whose initial appeal was its ability to survey the scene, was not itself making the scene to be surveyed. […]

Editors of the Digest for a while were understandably reticent about this development.  The practice grew up only gradually.  In the April 1930 Digest appeared the first article not attributed to any source publication.  The article, “Music and Work”, was unsigned.  Avoiding any damagingly clear admission of originality, it was labeled “a special compilation for the Reader’s Digest.”

[…]

An independent study by George W Bennett of the five years between 1939 and 1943, inclusive, discovered the facts on 1,718 or 90 percent of the 1,908 articles during this period.  Of these, 720 were digests on the original formula, (reprinted abridgements of articles initiated by other periodicals), 311 were written expressly for the Digest and printed there alone.  The remaining 682 were digests of planted articles.  […]

In the age of the Graphic Revolution people quite naturally prefer a shadow of a shadow to a shadow of an original.  The uneasy editors of the most popular magazine of the 20th century, when they give readers gratis an attenuated piece of authentic literary originality, hardly dare confess it.  Not until lately has The Reader’s Digest openly defended its overshadowing of “real” abridgments by “imitation” abridgements.  The practice, it is said, offers “numerous advantages to the writer, the magazine which first publishes the material, and to the Digest.”  Where else but 20th Century America could editors have a guilty conscience and feel they might be cheating their readers when they offer something more original than it seems?

[Don’t answer that.]