Reader's Digest Condensed Books Editor Enjoyed Unabridged Life

John S. Zinsser Jr., who as editor of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s made nearly 800 carefully crunched versions of popular books available to millions of readers, died on May 27 at his home in West Cornwall, Conn. He was 84.

The cause was a heart attack, his son Stephen Wadsworth Zinsser said.

Mr. Zinsser was associate editor, executive editor and later editor in chief of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books from 1951 to 1987. The series, which began in 1950 and ran 47 years under that name, provided subscribers with three to six shortened best sellers in anthologies that were, at first, published four times a year, and later every other month. It is now known as Reader’s Digest Select Editions.

Among the authors whose works were edited under Mr. Zinsser were William Faulkner, Herman Wouk, John Steinbeck, Daphne Du Maurier, Thor Heyerdahl, John P. Marquand, Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett, James Herriot, Peter Benchley and John le Carré.

I read a bunch of these that my paternal grandmother left on her bookshelves after she passed away, and I still have several in my library: Reader's Digest Best-Loved Stories For Children, featuring such tales as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Treasure Island, Robin Hood, Tom Sawywer, The Scarlet Pimpernel, et. al. Later, reading unabridged versions of the same books, I often found I preferred the Reader's Digest versions. These editions often featured specially-commissioned art; the artwork and treasure map in Treasure Island are on a par with the N.C. Wyeth editions.