The Press: The Common Touch

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Too Vulgar?" "Whatever Is New for Women Is Wrong") and in the stockpile he had condensed in St. Paul; the rest he got from magazines in Manhattan's Public Library. When he visited editors to ask permission to reprint articles, Wallace was so shy that he sometimes took Lila along. Editors readily gave him permission to reprint especially as Wallace assured them that the Digest would carry no ads, would therefore be no competition that way.

Since Wallace believed that the magazine's principal appeal would be to women, he headed the list of editors with "Lila Bell Acheson," and added, along with his own, the names of two women who had nothing to do with the magazine. For an office, he rented a basement room under a speakeasy at 1 Minetta Lane, in Greenwich Village. When the first issue of 5,000 copies arrived from the Pittsburgh printer, Wallace hired barflies from the speakeasy to help him and Lila wrap and address them. They piled the mail sacks into a taxicab, took them to the post office, then stopped in a café to toast the future.

The future was on them before they knew it. The mail poured in from subscribers, bringing ecstatic testimonials. Wrote "L.M.W." from Pennsylvania: "Its contents seem like nuggets of gold." "The Reader's Digest," announced Editor Lila Bell Acheson in the second issue, "is successful beyond all anticipations." The fifth month brought a crisis; the Digest couldn't pay the printer, and Wallace was plunged in gloom. At first Lila was crushed by these moods, which would "just descend on him like a black cloud. It was all new to me—it just isn't in my nature to worry. Then I realized he liked to worry, so I started kidding him out of it." Another flood of subscriptions ended the crisis.

In the Pony Shed. After that hot, sticky summer, remembering the shady trees of Pleasantville, they decided to move there. They found a $25-a-month "studio"—a single room above Manhattan Public Relations Man. Pendleton Dudley's garage—and used it as a bedroom, sitting room and office. The Wallaces cooked on a two-burner gas stove in the corner, washed in a stall shower in the garage below.

When Wallace bought a huge old desk and moved it—with a secretary—into their already cramped quarters, Lila rented an empty pony shed next to the garage for $10 a month, and turned it into the Digest's office. When Ralph Henderson, a jungle-born son of missionaries, dropped in from nearby White Plains to see what the little magazine was like, the Wallaces hired him as business manager, soon made him an editor. They later hired Harold Lynch, an assistant Episcopal rector, to handle the money. The Digest soon outgrew the pony shed, and spread all over Pleasantville. The mail got so heavy that the town had to have a bigger post office. By 1929 the seven-year-old Digest had 216,190 subscribers and was grossing more than $600,000.

On the Way. Yet Wallace was still haunted by fears of failure. He had taken great pains to keep the Digest's growth a secret,* and had kept the magazine off newsstands, for fear of attracting imitators. He was also afraid that other magazines would stop letting him reprint articles, and that someone else would beat him at his own game. Some of these fears were justified. When Wallace started to