Digests of books and magazines would not long remain so highfalutin. By the early twentieth century the Literary Digest had come down to the level of the newspaper reader. It was then read mostly for its summaries of journalistic reactions to current events, and for its items of popular interest discovered in the less popular magazines.
With the founding of The Reader’s Digest by De Witt Wallace, in February 1922, a new era of abridgments began. Wallace, son of a Presbyterian preacher-professor in a small midwestern denominational college, proved to be an editorial genius. His Digest was soon far more popular than any of the magazines it digested. It became the publishing phenomenon of the twentieth century. During the year 1959, for example, when the American Bible Society distributed a total of seventeen and a half million volumes of Scripture, The Reader’s Digest was published in some thirty editions (including Braille) and in thirteen languages, totaling a world circulation of about twenty-one million copies a month. In the United States alone its monthly circulation was then well over twelve million, which was almost twice the circulation of the next most popular American magazine. A reliable survey estimated that The Reader’s Digest was read every month by at least thirty-two million Americans—one of every four adults in the nation.
There is no better clue than the rise of The Reader’s Digest to the dissolution of forms and to the increasing secondhandness of our experience in twentieth-century America. This, the most popular magazine in the United States, has offered itself not as an “original,” but as a digest. The shadow outsells the substance. Abridging and digesting is no longer a device to lead the reader to an original which will give him what he really wants. The digest itself is what he wants. The shadow has become the substance.
The story of The Reader’s Digest is an epic (perhaps we should say a “pseudo-epic”) of the production of pseudo-events, of the dilution and tautologizing of American experience. Since 1939, when the Digest moved into a specially designed one-and-a-half-million-dollar Georgian-style office building, its headquarters have been an eighty-acre estate of park and wooded hills outside of Chappaqua, New York, employing about 100 editors and 2,500 clerical workers. It has offices also in New York, London, Paris, Copenhagen, Havana, Helsinki, Quebec, Madrid, Milan, Oslo, Rio de Janeiro, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Sydney, Toronto, and Tokyo. Its writers are constantly traveling the world. But the magazine had modest beginnings. The first issue was prepared in a one-room basement office under a Greenwich Village speakeasy, by De Witt Wallace and his wife, Lila Acheson Wallace, a former English teacher and social worker. They put it together with their own scissors and paste and carried the mail sacks to the post office. It was an immediate success.
The venture could be started on a shoestring precisely because it required no authors or editors. 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 pattern which has changed very little, consisted of sixty-two pages (exclusive of the covers) and offered thirty-one articles. A legend on the cover of an early issue announced: “ ‘An Article a Day’ from leading Magazines—each article of enduring value and interest, in condensed permanent booklet form.” True to its factitious character, the Digest represented itself not as a commercial enterprise, but as an “Association.” The issue of August, 1923, explained, “The Reader’s Digest is not a magazine in the usual sense, but rather a co-operative means of rendering a timesaving service. Our Association is serving you; it should also be serving your friends.” There was indeed a Reader’s Digest Association. De Witt Wallace owned 52 per cent of the stock, Lila Acheson Wallace owned 48 per cent; subscribers automatically became “members,” but were not encumbered with any ownership or control.
The essence of the idea—“De Witt Wallace’s basic discovery”—as the official history of the magazine explains, was that this magazine would, by a mirror magic, actually express the reader himself. This is why it was called a reader’s digest. “Magazine articles could be written to please the reader, to give him the nub of the matter in the new fast-moving world of the 1920’s, instead of being written at length and with literary embellishments to please the author or the editor.”
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 magazine, so it could afterwards 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 even 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 a 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 are 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 1920’s (The North American Review, Scribner’s, The Century, Review of Reviews, Hearst’s International, The Forum, World’s Work, McClure’s, The American, Collier’s, Current History, Judge, the old Life, The Delineator, Pictorial Review, Woman’s Home Companion) 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 could not always be 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 such articles (pseudo-articles, if necessary) written for the purpose of being digested. Anyway, the difference 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 now itself making the scene to be surveyed. Like the political interview or the tourist attraction, the planted article was produced in the honest effort to do a job, to give people what they paid for and what they expected. It was the determination of Digest editors to be honest that actually accounted for the misrepresentation. The planted article, when it was digested in The Reader’s Digest, could, of course, honestly be described as “Condensed from the American Legionnaire.”
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.” Three years later appeared the first signed original article, “Insanity—the Modern Menace,” by Henry
Morton Robinson. It was followed that year by a number of others, including “The Burning Question,” an article on cremation.
At about the same time there appeared in the Digest the first planted article. Sensitivity on this subject has made it hard to gather precise statistics. An independent study by George W. Bennett of the five years 1939 to 1943, inclusive, discovered the facts on 1,718, or 90 per cent, of the 1,908 articles printed in the Digest during this period. Of these, 720 were digests on the original formula (reprinted abridgments of articles initiated by other periodicals), 316 were written expressly for the Digest and printed there alone. The remaining 682 were digests of planted articles. In other words, only a little over 40 per cent of Digest items in this period were really “digests” of what had spontaneously appeared elsewhere. Almost 60 per cent were either confessed originals or disguised originals, fabricated by a contrived back-formation from a contrived original. Later samplings suggest that about the same proportion continued into the following years. Most of what one read in The Reader’s Digest, therefore, was not really a “digest” at all.
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 twentieth 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” abridgments. 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 in twentieth-century America could editors have a guilty conscience and feel that somehow they might be cheating their readers when they offer something more original than it seems?
III
THE READER’S DIGEST, while by far the most successful, was, of course, only one of a legion of digests. It produced a host of imitators and disciples. Scores of others sprang up quite independently. There was Writer’s Digest, Catholic Digest, Protestant Digest, Omnibook, Science Digest, Negro Digest, Mystery Digest, Children’s Digest, Compact: The Young People’s Digest, Quick Digest, New Editions (a digest of best sellers), and so on. Each commonly had a circulation larger than those of many of the magazines from which its materials were reprinted. Their existence, not to mention their spectacular success, witnessed the decline—even the dissolution—of literary form. When readers received (as the Digest might boast) only “the nub of the matter” instead of articles “written at length and with literary embellishments to please the author or the editors,” they were receiving idea without form. A piece of printed matter was then believed to exist in a non-literary void. Then a story or article was indeed a nub or essence, for which words were only so much baggage. It was an emanation—a whiff of literary ectoplasm exuding from print, but not really residing in any set of words. The most popular reading matter now offered itself as substance without form. “Literary embellishments” (that is, anything—matter or form—which interested the author but might not interest some particular reader) seemed so much waste. They seemed merely to interfere with the reader.
Magazine digests and abridgments—only one kind of many new dissolutions of form—were a by-product of the multiplication and cheapening of printed matter. Between 1885 and 1905 the number of magazines being published at any one time in the United States, according to Frank Luther Mott’s estimate, increased from 3,300 to 6,000. About 7,500 new magazines had been started. Seeing more magazines than anyone could possibly read, seeing a crowd of magazines almost indistinguishable from one another, the reader naturally needed help. He was glad to join an “association” to give him the “nub” of each of them.
Not only in popular writing have we seen a dissolution of form and a search for the essence. The same dissolution has gone on in the world of science. It helps explain the modern divorce between scientist and humanist. The humanist has always been interested in the particular form (the “literary embellishments”) in which an idea is cast. He has considered language, rhetoric, vocabulary, and dramatic structure inseparable from idea. But the scientist now more than ever treats a scientific article or book as only a vehicle. He moves further and further away from the literary skills which made John James Audubon on ornithology, Charles Darwin on biology, and William James and Sigmund Freud on psychology, become literary as well as scientific classics.
This is due not only to the fast pace of advance in twentieth-century science, but also to the sheer multiplication (since the Graphic Revolution) of the printed matter in which these advances are diffused. Between 1940 and 1960 the number of scientific and technical articles published each year increased twofold or threefold. In 1960 alone the number of these articles appearing in the sixty-odd major languages of the world was between one and two million. These were published in between 50,000 and 100,000 technical journals.
To collect and digest the information on any subject has therefore become a vast and complex new problem. To help solve it, an IBM inventor, H. Peter Luhn, has developed a computer program for “auto-abstracting.” A machine automatically makes a statistical analysis of all the significant words in an article. It is designed to omit the trivial words—the if’s, and’s, and but’s. Having calculated the ten or twenty most frequent words, the machine then picks out sentences with the highest density of these key words. An automatic compilation of these sentences becomes the “auto-abstract” of the article. The pressing need for such a machine comes from the fact that even the abstracts of scientific articles have become so numerous that no scientist can keep up with them. By the middle of the twentieth century there were about 300 journals devoted exclusively to summarizing articles appearing in other journals. “If we do not find some way of abstracting the abstracts,” observes Derek J. de Sola Price in his brilliant Science Since Babylon (1961), “it may well happen that the printed research paper will be doomed, though it will be difficult to rid ourselves of the obsession that it seems vital to science.”
What Thomas J. Watson, Jr., president of International Business Machines Corporation, calls the “Information Explosion” is having an ever wider and deeper effect on the form in which we are willing to have our ideas expressed. And incidentally, it cannot fail to affect the respect we show for literary or any other kind of form. Translation, until recently, has been among the subtlest, most difficult, and most respected of literary arts. Many literary figures (like Chapman, North, Dryden, and Longfellow) earned laurels by translations of Homer, Plutarch, and Dante. Others (like Fitzgerald and Scott-Moncrieff) attained literary fame primarily through their translations. Much of the intellectual finesse which came from a traditional classical education (in England, for example) came from the exercise of translation into and out of Greek, Latin, and English.
The decline of the classics and of foreign language study generally in America has gradually deprived us of this discipline. Now, in order to make available the increasing printed resources in other languages, the new data processing industry has perfected a machine translator. The Mark II machine, developed jointly by IBM and the Air Force, can take a passage of Russian and translate it into what IBM calls “rough but meaningful English.” Here is a sample product of the machine when applied to a passage of Russian literary criticism:
United States appeared new translation immortal novel L. N. Tolstago “war and world / peace.” Truth, not all novel, but only several fragments out of it, even so few / little, that they occupy all one typewritten page. But nonetheless this achievement. Nevertheless culture not stands / costs on place. Something translate. Something print. Truth, by opinion certain literature sceptics, translation made enough / fairly “oak.” But this, as they say, opinion separate malignant. If however who doubt in qualification translator, that admirer it / its talent can tell / disclose, that it possess store words, equal 600 thousands, at the time when Shakespeare had to satisfy all only some pitiful 24 thousands words. Inflamed disc
ussion literature specialists. Representative American unification translators, obviously, out of competition consideration, attempted defame new celebrity. Indicated, in particular, on that, that certain specific Russian expression translated too much literally, without transmission them / their true meaning. On the other hand, engineer assured, that this shortage will be soon after removed and on light / world will be able to appear even written in verse translation.
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