STRANGE THINGS YOU USED TO READ

I can still see the diagrams on the Tampax leaflet 🫣

I was an avid reader when I was young.
Would read any label of anything whilst on the loo. Tampax, haemorrhoids cream, shaving foam, anything. Medicine information leaflets were awesome.
Used to read the back and inserts of my parents LPs.
The small print on advertising on public transport and in newspapers.
Ts & Cs of competitions un my Mum's weekly mags.

The internet ruined me.

When I was 12/13 ISH ( very long time ago), I used to buy my weekly copy of Jackie and also Farmers Weekly. I absolutely loved the Farmers Weekly, it was full of strange and exotic stuff, don't know why I found it so fascinating.
I'm not from a farming background and we lived in East London so a bit of a mystery.
I then went on to study Agricultural Science at uni!

My nanna used to give us old copies of She magazine when I was little, and I read all of them. Picked up a few things I wasn't really ready for 😂

I was also obsessed by the pages in the phone book that had numbers for the speaking clock etc.

mums Living and Family Circle which when I married I bought myself one Christmas my mum bought me a FC subscription shame it finished
She magazine that was quite racy Dr Devlin his problem page was an eye opener to me aged 9!
Marshall Ward and Littlewoods Catalogues when they used to arrive we had to wait until Mum opened them it was torture thought she would never open it The Christmas editions were my favourites all those toys and decorations!
The Friendship Book by Francis Gaye there was a second hand shop near my Granny pocket money meant going to that shop they had loads of books I often got those books or Secret 7 books

This thread is lovely, but it’s also making me sad. Think of all the knowledge we happened across because we were bored.

Nowadays we’d be rotting our brains on TikTok.

Readers Digest condensed books. The Universal Home Doctor, ie. self-diagnosis before the Internet... there were a lot of conditions which were "incurable". James Thurber... the only thing of his people remember is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Walter_Mitty but his cartoons and books were surreal and funny.

Birthdays in The Guardian - guess the age of the famous person; by quizzing the rest of the family

Adverts for Au Pairs in The Lady when I was younger, imagining I'd do one of the jobs when older. I never did.

Property Porn in Country Life. But that's not weird.

The Lady and Country Life to be found in doctor's and dentist's waiting rooms.

The Obituary page in The Guardian, absolutely fascinating stuff. I used to get The Guardian for the crossword and the obituaries were on the same page.

This was in the late 1970's and our local library had a big reference section with an entire shelf filled with National Geographic books. I would go in there on the way home from school at least twice a week, and I worked my way through the entire lot. I can still remember an article about the Ngorongoro Crater.

Baby name books
Argos catalogue

My Grandparents had Giles cartoons too, also Readers Digest. My Dad read Ed McBain American police tales and I read all of those too. I'm not sure they were entirely appropriate. I remember one where someone was skinned alive. Arther Mee Children's Encyclopedia - a set of 10.

It’s appalling doggerel, but to 7 year old me, it was lovely - and it’s lodged firm 😂

Thanks, @CurlyhairedAssassin - that’s really given me a nostalgia trip 🥰

That is terrible poetry.. 😆

Why that was flagged as a sensitive image I'll never know...

Here it is!

I loved our copy of The Fireside Book of David Hope. I can still remember a poem called Apple Green Plates.

We had a 1920s set of encyclopedias, "The Book of Knowledge", lots of stuff about the Empire, Naval flags etc. There were bits about how the body worked illustrated with little men, e.g. stoking the "boiler" of your digestion, which I quite liked. As might be expected, they were INCREDIBLY racist.

I had the Fireside Book of David Hope! Someone bought it me for a present and I liked it so much I asked for the next edition when it came out.

Oh and at one set of grandparents, all the Giles annuals. At the other, Andy Capp.

I am super au fait with just about any lower middle or working class popular culture reference between about 1950 and 1989. If it wasn’t in a Giles cartoon it didn’t really happen.

I read so many problem and letter pages that I’m actually quite good at knowing what county any given town is in.

Luna North,
Coventry, W Mids.

I read Reader's Digest avidly too.

Pam Ayres poetry.
James Herriot.
Catherine Cookson.
Lena Kennedy.

In the days before YA you had to read what you could get your hands on.

My mum’s Prima and Family Circle.
The Argos book.
Cake decorating books.
Cookery books.
Grattans Catalogue.
My dad’s film books - big coffee table books featuring stills from various Hollywood movies.

Didn't everyone read the cereal packet? I mean, it was Right There...

Reader's Digest here too, and Punch (as well as all the cartoons there was Let's Parler Franglais and Freaky Fables, and the Caption Competition won more often than not by C Thompson of Glasgow).

The Friendship Book by Francis Gay, and (not quite as good) the Fireside Book of David Hope. Little purple annuals at my grandmother's house. Among other things the Friendship Book was where I first encountered that quote about Young People Today from Plato.

My sisters and I had a phase of reading Barbara Cartland, which had a weird Venn Diagram relationship with Mills&Boon. Such a terrible attitude to instil in young women! Such a... sickening yet... twee... way of talking... about sex! Such a banal writing structure (single-sentence paragraphs)! Such intense detailed historical research!

The dictionary. Never intentionally. Normally after looking something up for a crossword, or a game of Scrabble.

The New Book of Knowledge, a set of children's encyclopaedias from the 1930s. And their companion the Children's Treasure House.

For a while, the hatch-match-despatch and the classifieds in the local paper.

There was the Property Guide as well, but that's normal. (Still remember the fantastic 10-bedroom several-acre property that was the most expensive one I'd ever seen. £100k.)