Readers Digest.

Ralf and Florian

My Grandmother used to get this in the 70s and 80s.I remember the sections where readers would send in "amusing" stories in Laughter The Best Medicine and Humour In Uniform (military related stories).There was also Ways to increase your wordpower by Peter Funk.My favourite section was Drama in real life which were truelife stories of people surving disasters such as being attacked by crocodiles in Australia or plane crashes in remote areas like the Canadian wilderness,and it would always be illustrated by a dramatic drawing of the ordeal.Did anyone else get it in their house?

Capt'n Midnight

And the computer that picked everyone every year.

Or trying to get off their mailing list

Judgement Day

In fairness it was a great magazine with something for everyone and the monthly abridged books were often a cracking read. I still have "The Last Great Auk" by Allan Eckert which I cut out and saved from the late 1960s.

L1011

My mother had an absolute panic when the example date of birth on their forms for a few years was her exact actual DOB. Thought they were sending her custom magazines until I pointed out she was buying them in a newsagents!

r3nu4l

I used to love this magazine when I was a kid! My Mam had copies dating back to the early 70s just before I was born. You also forgot 'Life's Like That' where readers submitted their own funny 'true' stories.

Timely thread OP because only yesterday I remembered a story I read (submitted by a reader sometime in the early 80s), where a woman was defrosting her freezer and when her phone rang she thought it would be funny to answer and say 'Scott Antarctic Base'. There was a pause for about three seconds and then the voice at the other end said 'Oh my god, the phone bill!' and hung up.

It was a fantastic read and full of really interesting information in its day.

Judgement Day

And it still exists http://www.readersdigest.co.uk/ ! I thought it must have gone the way of the Dodo as I haven't seen a copy in years. I'm surprised I haven't noticed it in the many charity shops that I haunt. I remember seeing it available from vending machines in English railway stations in the late 1970's - perhaps it still is?

Ninap

Gene Kerrigan once memorably described it as the literary wing of the CIA.

Ralf and Florian

r3nu4l wrote: »

I used to love this magazine when I was a kid! My Mam had copies dating back to the early 70s just before I was born. You also forgot 'Life's Like That' where readers submitted their own funny 'true' stories.

Timely thread OP because only yesterday I remembered a story I read (submitted by a reader sometime in the early 80s), where a woman was defrosting her freezer and when her phone rang she thought it would be funny to answer and say 'Scott Antarctic Base'. There was a pause for about three seconds and then the voice at the other end said 'Oh my god, the phone bill!' and hung up.

It was a fantastic read and full of really interesting information in its day.

Ah yes I was getting Lifes Like That mixed up With Laughter The Best Medicine.The latter were general funny stories and weren't sent in by readers.

C.K Dexter Haven

I remember the first time I heard about AIDS was through an article in the Readers Digest, about 5 months before it became headline news across the Atlantic. The other thing I remember reading about first in the RD was an article about driver air bags in cars, of all things, again, long before they became common knowledge.

It's almost quaint looking back now, when compared to what a vast amount of information we have these days, at our fingertips.

This was only the 80s, so not that long ago, although that's another lifetime for some I guess.:D

Fuzzy Clam

I still have it delivered.

Ralf and Florian

Fuzzy Clam wrote: »

I still have it delivered.

Out of interest are any of the features I mentioned in the first post still going?

Fuzzy Clam

Ralf and Florian wrote: »

My Grandmother used to get this in the 70s and 80s.I remember the sections where readers would send in "amusing" stories in Laughter The Best Medicine and Humour In Uniform (military related stories).There was also Ways to increase your wordpower by Peter Funk.My favourite section was Drama in real life which were truelife stories of people surving disasters such as being attacked by crocodiles in Australia or plane crashes in remote areas like the Canadian wilderness,and it would always be illustrated by a dramatic drawing of the ordeal.Did anyone else get it in their house?

Wordpower is still there. Laughter is The Best Medicine may just be called Laugh! now. It's a mixture of readers jokes and bits taken of the 'net.
No Humour in Uniform.
Many articles would be very similar to what you describe but perhaps with a different description. For example, in Novembers issue, theres an item about a flight in distress titled "Miracle on Flight 516".

It's still a good read. Most issues feature a well know person. This month it's Dame Judi Dench. It hasn't yet plummeted to the depths of Peter Andre:D

nlgbbbblth

My grandfather bought it for almost all of his adult life. He also bought my mother a subscription every year as a gift. I started reading it in 1980 and gradually looked forward to each month's edition. Loved It Pays To Enrich Your Word Power, Life's Like That and Laughter: The Best Medicine. Wasn't too gone on Humour In Uniform.

Grandad died in 1989 so that was the end of it. There's still plenty of editions in my parents' attic. When I go up there I usually flick through a few and am instantly transported back to my childhood.

LoganRice

My father still buys them. We regularly read them on holiday. It's nice how you can read them anywhere because they're compact.

Posy

I lost interest in the Reader's Digest when they started putting celebrities on the cover. I felt it really declined in the last few years. I used to get it religiously every month but stopped around the mid/late 00's. Absolutely used to love that magazine!

I got lots of second hand editions in Chapters Bookstore in the 1990's so ended up with shelves and shelves of Reader's Digests!
Unfortunately I amassed such a collection of them, I had to do a big cull a couple of years ago and throw a lot away but I still have about three boxes in the attic with lots of old editions from the 1960's onwards.

r3nu4l

Fuzzy Clam wrote: »

Most issues feature a well know person. This month it's Dame Judi Dench. It hasn't yet plummeted to the depths of Peter Andre:D

Posy wrote: »

I lost interest in the Reader's Digest when they started putting celebrities on the cover.

That's how I feel about it too. I think that when a magazine has to resort to celebrities on the cover to sell itself, then something has gone wrong.

For me, the magic of the magazine was that they covered topics in some depth and the topics themselves were a very good mix of articles. Rather than being a single topic magazine dedicated to science, technology, gardening, design or geography, it contained a nice mix of all of those subjects, as well as short stories.

I read the New Yorker a lot and it reminds me in some ways of the Reader's Digest in that it's a magazine with great fiction, essays, and topical reporting around issues of importance. It's nowhere near the same type of magazine but there is a vague familiarity there for me.

LynnGrace

A neighbour used to pass the RD on to us, many moons ago. I loved it. Laughter's the Best Medicine, Humour in Uniform etc. I still remember articles I read in it, including the plane crash in the Andes, where the survivors ate human flesh.

Ralf and Florian

One of the articles from the early 80s that I remember was called Network Of Terror,about the way various terrorist groups from around the world were linked including the IRA and most had connections to Carlos The Jackel who at the time was the worlds most wanted man.There was another article about the biker mafia which may have early 90s.

fryup

i used to love the cartoon funnies

and every so often my old man would get a letter from them to say he won 50k, but of course reading the small print....he would have to take out a year's subscription to be included in the draw for the 50k

r3nu4l

Reader's Digest has been sold for £1.

Micky Dolenz

I used to love, Laughter, the best medicine.

C.K Dexter Haven

r3nu4l wrote: »

Reader's Digest has been sold for £1.

It might relaunch itself but the internet has really killed these kind of magazines

thejuggler

We used to get it delivered in the 70s and 80s
My memory is of getting letters from RD signed by 'Tom Champagne- Prize Draw Manager' imploring us to buy their latest book or CD collection and offering to enter us into their latest prize draw (the prizes were good but I never saw them advertising any winners in Ireland) The letters were very frequent - maybe one per fortnight. I don't think we ever entered the draws but we bought a few books and compilation CDs from them over the years. (This was back in the 80s) I saw RD on the shelf in a newsagent recently - first time in ages.

L1011

thejuggler wrote: »

My memory is of getting letters from RD signed by 'Tom Champagne- Prize Draw Manager' .

Who was actually a real person:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10067180/Tom-Champagne.html

cml387

The amount of junk mail they sent out was a standing joke (Esther Rantzen used to regularly have a go at them on That's life).

You may already have won £10,000!!!

I remember one bulging envelope which contained a Golden Key, I have no idea to what end.

r3nu4l

cml387 wrote: »

The amount of junk mail they sent out was a standing joke (Esther Rantzen used to regularly have a go at them on That's life).

Yeah, it kind of ruined the magazine's reputation back then. They totally overdid it and requests to unsubscribe from their prize draw listing usually went unanswered and the stuff kept coming. It's a pity that they operated in that way because the magazine itself used to be brilliant, especially in those pre-internet days when it was difficult to come across unusual yet highly interesting stories.

RainyDay

r3nu4l wrote: »

Yeah, it kind of ruined the magazine's reputation back then. They totally overdid it and requests to unsubscribe from their prize draw listing usually went unanswered and the stuff kept coming.

Apparently, the only way to unsubscribe was to order some products and not pay for them. They tended to unsubscribe quickly after that.

r3nu4l wrote: »

It's a pity that they operated in that way because the magazine itself used to be brilliant, especially in those pre-internet days when it was difficult to come across unusual yet highly interesting stories.

I've just realised what an uncool middle-class teenage geek I was in the pre-internet days (late 70s). I bought a load of second-hand RDs from an elderly lady, via an advert in a freesheet newspaper. She arrived at the front door one day with a pile of books in her little pullalong trolley bag. I was over the man, and had a splurge of early nights in bed, snacking on cheese and reading the RD articles.

L1011

cml387 wrote: »

I remember one bulging envelope which contained a Golden Key, I have no idea to what end.

Start the ignition of a "New! New! NEW! Ford Sierra" or similar from memory.

Due to the charity shop around the corner I read virtually every issue from ~1965 to 2000, it started going to waste around then. There was a brief period of about ten issues in the early 80s where they tried an Irish edition, clearly didn't even sell well here as the UK editions turned up in the same charity shops.

Ralf and Florian

I remember an article from the early 80s about Americas Nuclear programme.The name of the article was "Fingers on the nuclear trigger".There was a picture of the control room at a missile launch site with two guys seated at a control panel.Both of them had pistols in holsters and the captioned explained that they had the guns in case"the other should go mad and try to start his own nuclear war" that was it almost word for word.

downwesht

My English teacher used to call it the Bull****ters Bible! Best description ever!