Before smartphones took over the world, you would often see a magazine rack in someone's bathroom. Magazine articles are short or long, and you selected what to read by how long you thought you'd be in there. That's exactly the idea that John Javna had while sitting on the toilet one day in 1987. The first Uncle John's Bathroom Reader was published in 1988, which makes the series 30 years old now.
“John created it … based on the tradition that the whole family read a lot in the bathroom, and so did the whole world,” Gordon Javna told an Oregon newspaper in 2016. “I cracked up when I heard the idea from him, but it made a lot of sense.”
The first edition of the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, released in 1988, was a collection of short articles, like brief histories of various subjects and origins of words or phrases. Credited to the Bathroom Readers Institute, the books were a success. Sequels were released the following years until the brothers, along with a team of freelancers, were producing 10 titles a year.
How did the Bathroom Readers become so successful? We'd like to think that Neatorama helped, but a lot of it was the Bathroom Reader's Institute's work with price clubs. Read about the rise of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader at Tedium.
(Image credit: Flickr user Britt Reints)