![]() His college professor father loaned him $300 and in January 1920 Wallace produced a 64-page prototype issue of Reader's Digest, complete with 31 articles from publications such as Ladies' Home Journal, McClure's, and Vanity Fair. He suffered shrapnel injuries fighting in France in World War I, and he read a variety of popular magazines and practiced condensing their articles while he recovered. While employed as a traveling salesman, Wallace would condense and memorize important facts from magazine articles on three-by-five slips of paper in an effort to impress customers. The less esoteric Reader's Digest was the brainchild of William Roy DeWitt Wallace (1889-1981), a Minnesota-born college dropout who, according to biographer Peter Canning, touted various "schemes and stunts" as a young man. The magazine failed the following year, not long after Roosevelt was inaugurated for the second of his record four terms. Roosevelt would lose in a landslide in one of the first national presidential preference polls. The highbrow Literary Digest achieved a circulation of over one million by 1927, earning praise from Time magazine (another 1920s time-saving publication) as "one of the greatest publishing successes in history." But Literary Digest fell out of the reading public's good graces in 1936 when it incorrectly predicted that Franklin D. Almost 50 years later, Literary Digest, founded by Isaac Kauffman Funk of Funk & Wagnalls fame, capitalized upon the success of a British periodical, Review of Reviews, and presented condensations of articles from American, Canadian, and European publications. An American magazine called Littell's Living Age first reprinted periodical articles in 1844. ![]() Reader's Digest did not introduce the concept of sampling and condensing other publications. Printed in a handy booklet form that made it suitable for slipping into a coat pocket or purse, Reader's Digest featured 31 articles, one for each day of the month, culled from leading magazines, "each article of enduring value and interest, in condensed and permanent form," as the magazine maintained. An instant success that went on to become the most powerful vehicle for the printed word in the world, Reader's Digest was only one expression of the time-saving vogue when it was introduced in 1922. ![]() This movement toward greater efficiency extended into personal lives as well, as people sought to maximize their own working and leisure time. Time saving took on added importance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when businessmen sought to standardize the performance of the country's growing industrial sector. The moral obligation to save time has been a sovereign force in American culture since colonial days. ![]()
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