Word: reader
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Speaking before an overflow audience in Boylston Hall auditorium, Borges warned writers not to "dazzle or surprise" their readers. A writer should not let his words "stand between him and the reader," he cautioned: rather the words should be "invisible...
...Digest began life by compiling its entire contents from other periodicals and nurturing an evangelical ambition "to inform, inspire and entertain." For its first eight years, the magazine subsisted on previously printed wares, simplified and condensed to accommodate Wallace's notion of suitable brevity or a reader's attention span. Even today, the Digest frequently shears the lead paragraph from reprinted articles, on the assumption that the author is only clearing his throat. Both in selecting and cutting, Wallace's hand was sure from the start. With only minor amendment, much of the February 1922 issue...
There have been other alterations. In the beginning, the Digest carried no ads, largely to curry favor with its magazine sources, who did. But in 1954, after polling readers for permission, the Digest opened its U.S. edition to advertising, fielded orders for 1,107 pages within two weeks of the announcement. Last year, without benefit of liquor or tobacco ads, which it scorns in the U.S. edition, the Digest's gross ad revenue was $65 million. It also collected in excess of $60 million in circulation revenue. From time to time, the parent Digest has launched prosperous offspring, among...
...Wally Likes It." Today, as the world's most widely distributed magazine, the Digest wields an editorial force that often takes strange forms. Its preoccupation with sex might make even a Confidential reader blush. The Digest delights in double-entendre page-enders or fillers, rarely misses the chance to reprint notably daring sex lore from outside authorities. In 1957, for example, it condensed part of a book (A Woman Doctor Looks at Love and Life) that explicitly catalogued coital climaxes and advised disconsolate bedfellows that satisfaction "can take five years to perfect...
...that glared at me with all the silent indignation of a vicar who, in the middle of the service, has discovered that the organist is drunk." At Durrell's best, they are more; in his description, for instance, of the stoic heroism of foraging penguins, he fills the reader with his own great love for the world's wonderful beasts...