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Culture & entertainment

Reader's Digest was founded in a basement in New York

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The magazine your grandparents relentlessly forwarded to you started in the most clichéd entrepreneurial way possible. DeWitt Wallace and his wife Lila launched the pocket-sized publication from a tiny Greenwich Village basement in 1922. They simply repackaged existing articles from other publications into condensed versions, proving that aggregation has always been highly profitable.

Reader's Digest was founded in a basement in New York
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