Reader's Digest Starts in a Basement

On February 5, 1922, DeWitt Wallace and his wife Lila Bell Wallace put out the first issue of Reader's Digest, working out of a basement below a speakeasy in Greenwich Village. Wallace's idea was to take the best articles already running in other magazines, cut them down, and gather them in one place a busy reader could get through on a train ride. The couple sold the whole thing themselves through the mail rather than newsstands, and their ambitions were modest at first: enough income to live on, not an empire. By September of that year they had moved their editorial operation to Pleasantville in Westchester, the town where they had married two years earlier. It grew fast anyway: by 1929, the magazine counted 290,000 subscribers and pulled in $900,000 a year.