The Press: The Common Touch

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make so much money that he began to pay for the articles he reprinted, the other editors woke up to the Digest's size. They started to talk about refusing reprint privileges. Wallace soothed the grumbling magazines by agreeing to pay fat annual fees for reprint rights, in addition to paying for each article used. Imitators of the Digest sprang up by the score—many to wither after one season.

The fear of being boycotted by his source-magazines continued to haunt Wallace. If such a boycott were made, it would put him out of business overnight. In 1933, he decided on a drastic change in the Digest: it would start publishing its own original articles. There was another reason besides insurance against boycott. Says Editor Wallace: "We simply couldn't find enough articles of lasting interest and wide enough variety to fill the magazine."

Wallace thought up ideas for the articles he wanted, and hired free-lance writers to turn them out. Soon he made some of them Roving Editors and paid them annual retainers just to get first crack at their work. To keep up the illusion that the Digest was a digest, Wallace started giving articles to other magazines, then "condensing" and reprinting them. Big, successful magazines had no need for Digest articles, but struggling, small magazines were glad to get stories by authors they could not afford.

The fact that the Digest had become a competitor in the writers' market went almost unnoticed by other magazines—until 1935. Then Wallace had J. C. Furnas write an article, "—And Sudden Death," about traffic accidents. It became a sensation : hundreds of newspapers reprinted it, radio stations dramatized it, judges read it to traffic offenders or made them copy it. Fellow editors who had regarded Wallace as only a scissors & paste man began to change their minds. They began to realize that he had an extraordinarily common touch—a feeling for what the reading public wanted and how they wanted it.

The tangible evidence to this fact piled up rapidly. In the four years after Wallace had started to print original articles, Digest circulation shot from 449,666 to 2,469,527, a fantastic climb in a depression. By 1939, the Digest had outgrown all the vacant offices in Pleasantville. Wallace built a $1,500,000 red brick Georgian headquarters near Chappaqua, a few miles north of Pleasantville. But he kept the old mail address; Pleasantville sounded more like the Digest's right address;

Snug Harbor. As the magazine grew, it no longer hired everybody who stuck his head in the door. Wallace even took on some professionals. Some of them are ex-editors of magazines which Wallace had once "digested," and which later died. Kenneth W. Payne came from the North American Review, at 61 is now executive editor of the Digest. The managing editor, Alfred S. ("Fritz") Dashiell, came from Scribner's. After the Review of Reviews and the Literary Digest folded, Howard ("Skipper") Florance, who had edited both, came over; as senior editor, he now runs the "planting" of Digest-originated articles in other magazines. Other ex-editors who joined Wallace: Business Week's Marc Rose, American Mercury's Paul Palmer, American's Merle Crowell, Liberty's Fulton Oursler.

But the Digest's business affairs meandered along until