Reader’s Digest Publishes Special Issue

Subscription magazines don’t come any bigger than Reader’s Digest, at least in terms of circulation. It totals slightly more than 15 million copies a month in the United States, or 27.5 million when counting editions in 21 foreign countries.

Yet for all its consistency of purpose and familiarity of tone, the original feel-good magazine is daring to shake up things just a bit in a celebratory year.

Seventy-five years after DeWitt and Lila Wallace founded the publication in a basement in New York’s Greenwich Village as a way to spread the ideals of the American dream, the 75th-anniversary issue went on sale this week sporting a cover - with photographs - referring to various stories, not the customary table of contents.

What’s more, it’s a separate issue outside the monthly cycle, 2 million copies going only to newsstands.

“It is often said that we live in an age of cynicism, that high ideals and public virtue are no more a part of our future than gas lamps and horse-drawn carriages,” editor-in-chief Christopher Willcox writes in a “Dear Friends” letter that opens the new issue. “Undoubtedly, this is fashionable thinking. But is it true?”

“The American Dream: Today & Tomorrow” is the theme of the issue. According to Lesta Cordil, the magazine’s director of corporate communications, it may be the first in a line of special issues published in the years ahead.