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Reader's Digest part 3

Thursday, 23 October 2008

I remember that in the seventies the Reader’s Digest were in the post so often that even back then I wondered how a company could afford to advertise on such a scale. What was the circulation of these* Reader’s Digest* flexi’s? And how many of the LP-boxes were sold because of these flexi’s? And how many different flexi records did Reader’s Digest made? These are important questions, my friends.
Like Bas Trimbach said, many of these flexi records came into my place illegally. They are often found in sleeves of other records and I wouldn’t surprise me if the grow there. I also got a lot of these records for the price of one, because the previous owner had stuffed his whole collection in one sleeve. But I must admit that I have bought a few too. After all, it are advertisement records, and the music on these records is sometimes not the worst in the world. But my interest is not in all this: I am fascinated by the amount of these flexi’s.
There is little that can be compared with the joy of opening up a record sleeve and discovering a pile of flexi records in it. Even though it are most often mainly Reader’s Digest flexi’s, it always makes me happy. I don’t know how many times I found other flexi records in a sleeve that was supposed to house only one normal record, but finding five or more flexi’s at a time has occurred to me more than a handful of times.
I would love to see a project done with these Reader’s Digest flexi’s. Imagine that Fortyone or People like us would waste an evening on cutting up and mixing this material! If there is anybody who wants to set an example for such a project, please send me an mp3, and then I will use it to get others to do something similar too, until there is enough material for a compilation CD. Unfortunately I don’t have the eh,time for this right now.
Here is a flexi record that I got from Dirk Koorn.

It was in a sleeve with seven Reader’s Digest flexi’s. It was given away with volume 20/ number 6 of Sing Out!, a magazine that iI have never heard of, and the openings line of the first track is too good to be coincidental:

Comments:

Jan

2008-10-23 04:26:36

It’s just after reading your RD articles that I realize the value of these flexirecords. I’ve got a few in my possession as well, but I realize I’ve been mistreating them heavily. I will look them up, but I’m afraid it’ll be Willem Duys babbling away mainly…