Lileks has some thoughts:
Reader’s Digest was a staple in our house, because Grandma gave it to us every year as a Christmas gift. Until I learned that it was required to make fun of it, I enjoyed every issue. Quizzed myself on the vocabulary test (It pays to increase your word power! Peter Funk was the author, I believe; the name was amusing then, and sounds like a BEFORE part of a Viagra ad now), learned to appreciate the difference at an early age between “Life in These United States” and “Laughter is the Best Medicine.” (Non fiction vs. jokes.) As a hypochondriac from an early age, I avoided “I Am Joe’s Duodenum” or “I Am Joe’s Throbbing Mass of Inevitably Non-Functioning Gristle,” and I never read the Condensed Books. By the time I came along they were mostly expanded articles, running under the “Drama in Real Life(TM)” banner, I think. We had some Condensed Books, which seemed wrong on every possible level, like compressed ice-cream or Star Trek shortened for extra commercials. What would you take out of a book to condense it? Did they just pick characters and subplots and tease them out of the story like a colored thread in a loosely-knit yarn scarf?
We used to have both the magazine and a lot of compressed books at our summer cottage in northern Michigan, and I read them voraciously as a kid. The magazine seemed to go downhill in the past years, though, and I haven’t read one since I turned an adult. I’ll always remember, though Susan Sontag’s speech to her leftist cohorts in 1982, in which she outraged them by rhetorically asking who would have been better informed about the nature of the Soviet Union, and communism in general — readers of The Nation, or of Reader’s Digest? What replaces it today as a purveyor of the truth against ideological lies (not that it itself had done that for many years)? The mainstream media doesn’t seem to think there’s much market for it.
Here are more thoughts on RD, and MBA consultants, from the other McCain.
Popular Mechanics earned props for its Twoofer-debunking efforts.
…and I can still remember those table-of-contents covers like the one pictured on Lileks’ column (though from much later; I was minus-21 years old in 1941). When they stopped doing that, to me it stopped being Reader’s Digest.
Just a note, but Reader’s Digest only filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy which is just reorganization, not liquidation. The magazine will still be published.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090817/ap_on_bi_ge/us_reader_s_digest_bankruptcy
They are just working out an arrangement to swap debt for equity with their lenders. Like the Tribune bankruptcy in December this was a result of a bad management decision to take the company private through borrowing to buy out its stock.
So reports of its death are premature.
Also if you really like Readers Digest you could help it recover by subscribing to it 🙂
Good article. A funny space related story. At a party at a certain rich space tourist house, a few of us happened onto the library. A beautiful room, but all of the books were Readers Digest condensed books and similar non books!
One would have thought that the decorator would have at least done something other than thrift store shopping for this person.
Also, if you believe Wikipedia, they’re scaling back on celeb puff pieces in favor of stories about the military and ordinary people–so maybe not all is lost.
The magazine took a left turn and abandoned it’s market segment. I don’t know if Chapter 11 can fix this.
Yours,
Tom
Sounds like I bailed at the right time. I subscribed for many years, but then, yeah, it got too lightweight.
The theory on RD was that they reprinted and condensed articles from other magazines, hence Reader’s Digest. In reality, a lot of the articles were written by RD staff, placed in other magazines, and printed in RD too. The many articles attributed to the American Legion magazine were probably all like that. I mean, how much investigative reporting did the American Legion do?
John Barron was the RD reporter in their Washington bureau who made RD a better source on communism than The Nation. He wrote a number of books on the KGB. He also wrote an investigative piece on Chappaquiddick that is probably most responsible for us remembering Mary Jo Kopechne.