About Children's Digest

Children's Digest

Children's Digest was a monthly American children's magazine published from October 1950 to May/June 2009, when it was merged with Jack and Jill. Originally titled The Children's Digest, it was founded by George J. Hecht's Parents Magazine Press and was based in Indianapolis, Indiana, under its later publisher. It carried the ISSN 0272-7145.

The magazine's concept was simple and distinctive: it was, in effect, a Reader's Digest for children. Each issue gathered new stories alongside reprints of beloved classics, and it was advertised as selected reading to delight, instruct and entertain — the cream of new stories for boys and girls, with reprints of the best-loved classics. At its height it reached a circulation of around 700,000 copies a month, and for almost six decades it was a fixture of American childhood reading.

Founding by Parents Magazine Press

Children's Digest was created by the publishing house behind Parents magazine. George J. Hecht had founded Parents in 1926, and his Parents Magazine Press built a substantial line of children's publications, including comics and magazines such as Calling All Girls, True Comics and, from 1952, Humpty Dumpty — which became Children's Digest's sister publication for younger readers.

The first issue of Children's Digest appeared in October 1950. Harold Schwartz was among its early editors; later editors included Elizabeth Redousakis Mattheos, Anita Malnig and Lois Cantrell. The magazine aimed at children roughly seven to twelve years old — most descriptions say eight to twelve — old enough to read independently but young enough to be guided in their choices, which is precisely the audience a digest of approved stories was designed to serve.

The digest format and the eye-ease paper

As its name promised, the magazine appeared in digest size, smaller than a standard magazine. Its most recognisable physical feature, however, was its paper: for many years Children's Digest was printed on light green paper. The publisher called it eye-ease tinted paper and claimed that scientific tests proved it easier on a reader's eyes, avoiding the strain of black type on bright white stock.

The green pages became the magazine's signature — the feature by which generations of former readers identify it. The concept behind the magazine mirrored the paper's purpose: just as the tint was meant to make reading physically comfortable, the selection was meant to make it intellectually safe, offering parents a pre-screened library between covers.

Early contents: classics in story and comic form

The magazine's original concept resembled Reader's Digest aimed at children: it reprinted stories and comics, and for a time each issue contained a story book with many illustrations. Famous works that appeared in its early years included Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories, Lucretia P. Hale's The Peterkin Papers and L. Frank Baum's American Fairy Tales.

Comics played a larger role than modern readers might expect. A 1951 newspaper account reported that the magazine carried an average of forty pages of special comics dramatising classic novels, with titles such as Gulliver's Travels and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland rendered in picture-story form. The strategy treated comics not as a rival to reading but as a bridge into the classics.

Covers by Gyo Fujikawa

From December 1951 to September 1963, the magazine's covers were illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa, the Japanese-American artist and author whose warm, diverse images of children later made her famous in picture books. She produced six additional covers between November 1963 and December 1965. Other cover illustrators of the period included Arthur Szyk, Gustaf Tenggren, Anthony Ravielli, Bob Kuhn, Frank McCarthy, Leonard Weisgard, Tomi Ungerer and Gordon Laite, along with work associated with Hergé and John Tenniel — a roster that reflects the magazine's investment in serious illustration.

Change in the 1960s: from reprints to a modern mix

Starting in the 1960s, the content shifted from reprinted stories toward a combination of reprints, modern stories and nonfiction. The change is visible in the wording on the magazine's spine, which moved from promising best stories, famous classics and picture stories to advertising great stories, history, science, biography and true adventure.

Issues from the end of that decade show the new recipe at work. During 1969, Louis Wolf's Stories of Our American Past appeared in the January issue, Roy Chapman Andrews' All About Dinosaurs was published in February, and a biography of the football star Joe Namath appeared in the November issue. History, natural science and contemporary sport sat alongside the older fiction — a children's magazine adjusting to readers whose interests were shaped by television and the space age.

Tintin in America

The magazine's most consequential reprint series ran from 1966 to 1979, when it serialised The Adventures of Tintin. Hergé's Belgian reporter was little known in the United States at the time, and Children's Digest — with a circulation of around 700,000 copies monthly in that period — introduced him to a mass American audience. The reprints are credited with increasing Tintin's popularity in the United States, making the children's digest an unlikely channel through which European comics entered American childhood culture.

Health, well-being and the later magazine

Under its later publishers the magazine kept its storytelling core but added a pronounced emphasis on children's health and well-being. Descriptions of the magazine in its later decades emphasise good health, nutrition and safety for its pre-teen readers, with articles on sports and favourite athletes, features on crafts, games and science, poetry and humour, and a column — Dr. Cory's — in which children could ask health questions.

That health focus fitted its ownership. In 1980 the magazine was sold by Parents Magazine Press to the Benjamin Franklin Literary and Medical Society — the organisation connected with The Saturday Evening Post Society — and it was thereafter published from Indianapolis in a larger format, abandoning the pocket digest size of its first three decades. The same publishing family issued Jack and Jill and Humpty Dumpty, making the three titles a graded ladder of children's magazines from preschool to pre-teen.

Final years and the Jack and Jill merger

Children's Digest continued as a monthly into the twenty-first century; a March 2006 issue survives in digital magazine archives. By then its circulation was far below its 1970s peak — advertising directories of the period listed figures in the tens of thousands — reflecting the wider contraction of print children's magazines.

The end came by merger rather than abrupt closure. In its May 2009 issue, publisher Joan SerVaas wrote to readers that in July 2009 Children's Digest would merge with Jack and Jill, the publisher's magazine for the same eight-to-twelve age group, which had a new look and followed its title characters and their friends as they chased stories for their own newspaper. Subscribers who received both magazines had their Jack and Jill subscriptions extended by the number of Children's Digest issues remaining. The final issue of Children's Digest was dated May/June 2009.

Legacy

Children's Digest lasted fifty-nine years — an exceptional run for a children's periodical — and its legacy is threefold. It demonstrated that the digest formula of curated reprinting could work for children as it had for adults. Its Tintin serialisation gave it a permanent footnote in comics history. And its green eye-ease pages made it one of the most physically distinctive magazines ever sold to American children, remembered by sight and touch as much as by anything printed on them.