Historic Highlights of an Iconic Magazine

February 2023 marks exactly 75 years since the English edition of Reader's Digest Canada was launched. That was 26 years after it was first published in the United States (where it just celebrated its 100th anniversary). Here are some of the most significant moments in our long history.

1922 DeWitt and Lila Acheson Wallace publish 5,000 copies of the first issue of Reader's Digest, "the little magazine," in New York. It has 64 pages and 31 articles-one for each day of the month-all condensed from other publications. Just before the launch, DeWitt Wallace said, "The Digest will have but one mission: to interest and at the same time to widen one's outlook, to increase one's appreciation of things and people, to enlarge one's capacity for enjoyable association with fellow men, to lubricate the process of adjustment to this world."

1924 RD's first anti-tobacco article appears, entitled "Does Tobacco Injure the Human Body?"

1928 Reader's Digest becomes the first-ever ink-print publication to be produced in Braille.

1929 Subscribers number more than 200,000, and the magazine hits newsstands for the first time.

1933 The first original article is published. (Before now, the magazine has published selected reprints.) The article is: "Insanity-the Modern Menace," by Henry Morton Robinson. The next year, RD expands from 64 to 128 pages.

1935 RD's original article, "-And Sudden Death," is published. It is about the preventable carnage of automobile accidents. The New Yorker called it "The most widely read magazine article ever published anywhere."

1936 The number of subscribers reaches two million. The Wallaces establish the Reader's Digest Foundation, benefiting education and journalism.

1938 The first international edition of Reader's Digest is launched, in the U.K.

1940 The first foreign-language edition the Latin American edition launches. Initially, Selecciones is printed in Chicago, but starting in 1944, it's printed in Havana, Cuba.