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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

I can still see the diagrams on the Tampax leaflet 🫣

Friday ad - bizarre bazar and there was also a section about trying to connect with someone ypu saw on the street

Loved Home and Freezer Digest!!!

Dad's Exchange and Mart, His plastics & Rubber weekly. Much more innocent than it sounds! Though my Brother and I thought it should come in a plain wrapping!

My dad took that as well! P&R weekly!

I used love reading the Miscellaneous Section of Exchange and Mart, the weird things people used to try and sell!

Not so much reading - at school in the 80s there was loads of clothing catalogues ( Freeman's etc) from the previous decade in the craft department. We thought the most hilarious thing ever was the men in flares, and even funnier was the men in y-fronts. Kept us amused for hours

there used to be such good magazines so many gone and the ones that have survived are not as good
Annabel
Freezer Digest
Womans Realm
Living
Family Circle
to name but a few

Saga magazine aged 10. Not really target demographic

Anything & everything.

I loved my older brother's collection of Giles annuals and my Nana's 'Miss Read' books (my favourite was 'Emily Davies').

My parents had the full collection of The Book of Knowledge which kept me absorbed for hours. My Mum's copies of Woman & Woman's Own. My Auntie's copy of 'Lace' by Shirley Conran which taught me an awful lot about sex when I was a young teen.

My younger brother's copy of 'Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World' absolutely fascinated me and scared me at the same time.

Reading was a compulsion for me and still is.

Oh yes and old medical dictionary of my mum's. Lots of black and white photos of people muffled up lying in bed on alpine balconies while recuperating from TB. Strange drawings of the human body showing the sections of the body - respiratory system, organs etc with a small smile on his face. Old fashioned names for illnesses and conditions; some incredibly offensive nowadays: "idiocy" "cretinicy" and so on. Seriously. There was also a section on what happened to the body just before and after death etc. Quite scary to read as a kid.

i think it was already ancient when my mum inherited it.

Same! We used to howl 😂

Loving this thread. Readers digest for me and also whatever my dad had on his bedside table. Wisden cricketing annual and inexplicably, Jeffrey Archer

Cereal packets at breakfast, telephone directory, Argos catalogue, Readers Digest all favourites here too! As a teen the Habitat catalogue was my absolute favourite and as a pp mentioned apart from Judy Blume books and Flowers in the Attic, I don’t remember much early teen reading… I do remember reading The Thorn Birds when I was probably a bit too young! 🤣

I loved reading dictionaries. I liked to find words with definitions that must be tricky, such as "colour". One children's dictionary didn't define it, but said "red and blue are colours". A better one did make more of an effort, but the definition of "whether" was "if", and "if" was "whether".

I also liked clothing catalogues, with the exotic names of colours, which would not be "red" and "yellow", but "vermilion" and "tropical". These catalogues always showed people wearing trainers without socks, which I used as justification for doing so myself.

As a child, I had Claire Rayner's "The Body Book": I've still got it, and it was clearly written for children. It described the sexual act in some detail, without using the word "sex", showed a boy peeing against a tree, had a close up drawing of a bumhole, and made no secrets about "growing old and dying". On the subject of touch and pain, it said "Most people don't like pain". Why only most people, I wondered? Why not all?

More recently, Jeffery Archer's prison diaries. I haven't read anything else by him, but I found the prison diaries absolutely riveting.

Yes! I read my DFs Thurber books and loved them! Must have been A Thing in Britain at the time (60s - 70s?) And the Desmond Morris book The Naked Ape? (Had a cheeky cover with nekkid men and ladies on, was about human behaviour)...

Also: the instruction manual for every machine or white good in the house, including the car.

Ministry of Agriculture pamphlets on bot fly and sheep blight and rabies (again, DFs job). And a book on caring for Army mules and horses in the desert from his National Service. 😢

DMs books were all orange Penguins of films of the time, like Room at the Top, The L-Shaped Room and Billy Liar.

My DM had a mucky paperback called The Barn, which I used to sneak into her bedroom to read

I have found my tribe! I read so many of the above. I can add decades-old Eagle annuals when at my Nanna’s. They had been my aunt’s & she’s a fellow “readanything&everythinger”.
In the late 80s I’d pick up DP’s Construction News on my way out of the house & read it on the tube on my way to work as an English teacher. I learned a lot about the Drax power station.

My grandmother read The Lady, and my grandfather has The Spectator so would read those when at their house.

Thelwell
Horse and Hound
Giles cartoons

James Herriot books

Argos catalogue
Stocking Fillas catalogue (does anyone remember that?)