Have You Ever Seen Anything LIke this on Internet Archive Before?

Post by **ColleenMc** » July 28th, 2018, 1:20 pm

I was randomly browsing and came across "The Book of Beauty" here:

https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.272701/2015.272701.The-Book#page/n0

It's copyright 1914 and the cataloging information just includes that book and author and copyright date. So far so good.

So I'm flipping around in it and wondering how they had so much to say about beauty because this is a 600+ page book. I then notice that the typeface has changed and the page headings say things like "Night of the Hunter" and "My Cousin Rachel", both of which are novels that were published well after 1914. I poke around some more and discover that "The Book of Beauty" ends at page 124. Page 126 on are a Reader's Digest Condensed Books volume from 1955!

Weird! Maybe they were digitizing two different books and accidentally made them part of the same file?

Colleen

Post by **annise** » July 28th, 2018, 2:24 pm

certainly looks like it. I'd forgotten all about readers digest condensed books, there were a pile of them at home which I devoured enthusiastically.

Anne

Post by **knotyouraveragejo** » July 28th, 2018, 3:31 pm

Heh, we had boxes and boxes of them after my mom passed away. It's really had to give them away. Libraries won't take them and even the senior centers said no thanks!

Post by **mightyfelix** » July 28th, 2018, 8:44 pm

I still find them all the time. Antique malls, resale shops, garage sales. Sometimes I'll pick one up, if it has a story that sounds interesting.

Post by **ColleenMc** » July 30th, 2018, 10:09 am

They used to be the bane of my existence when I first started out selling used books on line way back in the late 90s. They were all worthless for resale purposes and took up so much space in thrift stores and library sales!

(The other things you could ALWAYS find in thrifts of that era: Rush Limbaugh’s hardcovers from the early 90s when he Was having a moment, and talk radio hosts spinning into books was a new thing; and the Book of Mormon. Rush seems to have gone the way of the condensed books but there is still at least one Book of Mormon in every thrift store bookcase!

Fortunately, I think one side effect of thrifts and library sales becoming aware of resellers is that they started weeding out more of these books that were crowding out books that might sell faster. Or maybe everyone’s grandparents who collected them have all passed on and the books sold off, and no one was buying and keeping them after a certain point. I know they still existed into the 80s because my grandmother bought them! They might still exist now for all I know...

One good thing about RD condensed books— they are one of the only books I have NO qualms about destroying for found art and assemblage / mixed media projects!

When I was a kid and reading these at my grandparents’ beach house, I thought a great job would be to be the person who condenses the books! Just think, getting paid to read all day and cross out the boring bits!