years’, Sook closes on British edition of Waiting-room staple Reader's Digest

After almost a century in print, during which it became a near-ubiquitous presence in libraries and dentists' waiting rooms, the British edition of Reader's Digest magazine has succumbed to financial pressures, closing down with immediate effect.

- Esther Addley

It shut down "after 86 wonderful years", its editor-in-chief, Eva Mackevic, wrote on LinkedIn, because it "just couldn't withstand the financial pressures of today's unforgiving magazine publishing landscape".

Founded in the US in 1922 by DeWitt Wallace and Lila Acheson Wallace as a roundup of diverse stories from various magazines, the title became a huge and rapid success.

The British edition was launched in 1938; almost 50 other international editions would follow, making it one of the biggest-selling monthly publications in the world.

At its peak in the 1970s, the title had 17 million subscribers in the US, its homespun columns such as Laughter: the Best Medicine and Humour in Uniform proving so enormously lucrative that its Manhattan HQ was hung with paintings by Picasso, Monet and Van Gogh. In its heyday in the 1950s, it famously took on the tobacco companies by drawing the links between smoking and lung cancer.