STRANGE THINGS YOU USED TO READ

[Alleycat321]

I loved reading the residential telephone directory when I was young, looking up the names and address of people that I knew.

Also, my local residential street directory.

Also, local events’ programmes (summer fares/fetes).

Also, cereal boxes.

What about you?

Always read 'trade-it' & Dentons business directory.... from the ages of about 7 to 13! 🤣
Trade-it.... I used to look for the pets for sale & 'personal' adverts 😆
Dentons.... I have no idea why!

Machine Mart adverts in magazines - so much detail!

Fortean Times.
UFO Monthly.
Bitch.

Credits on films, and not just the main actors etc, but the grips and folio people, whatever they do.

Local trade mags - as per PP - loved all the ads about pets and plumbers haha. Also remember reading a really strange novel about a 12yo girl whose mother went into hospital (possibly died?) and her father was struggling, and they had a play fight, and it led to rape .....and then she forgave him... I still think about the deeply inappropriate reading material I was riding in my library's kids' section!

As a child in the 1970s,

Home and Freezer Digest
The Grattan Catalogue

fond memories!

The Coopers of Stortford mail order catalogue pages that came with the Sunday papers. I lived in Derbyshire as a child but later did move to Bishops Stortford and could go to the actual shop which in comparison to the catalogue was rubbish!

Outdated copies of Readers Digest when I was in my tween years, to start with I'd just read the jokes and the section about silly things that had happened to people but I went back to them and read the longer articles too. I remember one about some sort of innovative medical practice which was amazing but probably completely old hat by the time I read it

Death notices and obituaries 😁

Snap!! My grandparents had a huge back catalogue and I used to spend hours reading stuff which made no sense to me!

I used to read a dictionary for fun. 😂

From the age of around 9 I used to read my dad's copy of the Reader's Digest.

Yes. I loved RD as a young teen. I was too old for children books but there wasn’t much out there for that age group in the mid eighties. Judy Blume and not much else.

I used to read my dad's readers digest too. It pays to improve your word power and laughter the bed medicine.

Best medicine, not bed medicine 😀

Hating the capitals but think this thread has potential

I'll raise you Jan Kramer

Ah yes, It pays to improve your word power. Loved that.

conspaircy type magazine called X-Factor
then story wise Literotica

Readers Digest here too!

And I was obsessed by the problem pages of women's magazines. I was in the Guides and we were sent to do a first aid course in the local courthouse and goodness knows why, but there were piles of magazines: quite tame stuff like Woman's Own etc.
The course leaders were pretty lax, and I remember lying on the jury's benches absorbed by all the relationship problems and the agony aunts' replies. I still enjoy reading Philippa Perry's advice pages in the Guardian now. Pamela Connolly's advice on sexual issues is rubbish though.

I remember being fascinated as a child by Barbara Cartland's Book of Etiquette, which we inexplicably had a battered old copy of. I never got tired of it, learning that you should not greet your husband wearing "down-at-heel slippers" and so on.
We also had the Reader's Digest book of Strange Stories, Amazing Facts that had lots of paranormal sort of things in it - ghosts and cryptids and the like. It was fab but really weird.

Oh yes! I used to read my gran's copies of Women's Own, Your Weekly and Bella too, I think I started doing pelvic floor exercises in my teens because of an article in one of those

Me too!

Back of stuff/packaging: cereal boxes, vitamins tub, the back page of my dad's running club newsletter (full of rude jokes and satirical Dear Editor letters), etc. Typical 90s breakfast table kid

Travel guidebooks at the library. Did I ever go to Algeria, or Suriname, or Toronto? No. Was the information in the book likely, even then, to be 7 years out of date? Of course.

Survival books - I believe this is another common 90s-early 2000s trait. We all wanted to know what to do if our plane crashed in the Namibian desert, or if we were trapped in an avalanche.

I used to love the problem pages too. From Cathy and Claire in Jackie to Claire Raynor, Virginia Ironside etc..
I think Mumsnet is like a problem page and letter page. That's why I love it.

Birth announcements in newspapers. Loved the interesting names etc

… Jessica Rose , born to Henry and Letitia, and sister to Phoebe May and Rupert John.

Rag Week joke booklets sold by students from the local university.

A relative’s Nursing Times for the gory photos.

The Watchtower, put through the door by the local JWs.