Reader’s Digest – So long, and thanks for all the books!

I flipped through a home and garden magazine, lingering over a DIY article on repurposing old furniture as book shelves and running a voyeuristic eye over the books on those shelves. Most of the photographs accompanying the article displayed books shelved with spines in, which always makes me wonder how the owners manage to find the book they want to read. Maybe by size, with Leaves of Grass being slender and Moby Dick fat? 

As I pondered this dilemma, one other thing about the photographs struck me. The few books shelved so that their spines were visible were. . . Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. The very books I grew up reading, then tried to disown as hopelessly bourgeoisie, have now found a place as decorative items. 

I didn’t know whether to weep or rejoice over the repurposing of those one-time standbys of middle-class, midcentury American families. 

When I was an adolescent in the very small town of Henderson, Texas, hub of rural Rusk County, bookshops did not exist. There was a public library—one for the entire county. My sister and I would walk or bicycle to the courthouse, which housed the library in the windowless bowels of its basement. There were, I think, two rooms. There were no children’s or teen’s section. Did the library possess any books written in the previous half-century? If so, I don’t recall. 

Reader's Digest Condensed Books

Bleak though the library was, I spent hours there during summer vacations. Because, although my junior high school had its own library (with windows!) those books were accessible only during school hours. Where else was a bookworm to go?

Not that the lack of bookstores didn’t mean our town was completely devoid of places to buy books. Local drugstores and emporia like M.E. Moses (a “five and dime” precursor of today’s Walmarts and Costcos) possessed standing kiosk-like bookshelves. Alongside paperback Westerns and romances, these sometimes sold more mainstream volumes, including my first copy of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

And then there were the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books my parents subscribed to. These arrived regularly in the mail. Each volume contained four or five abridged and, as I later learned, rather bowdlerized versions of current, book-length nonfiction, and some “classic” fiction. 

They were reading bliss. Especially after our family moved far enough out of town to make bicycling to the library an impracticably sweaty proposition during Texas summers. 

I devoured them. Remember, this was in the dark days before cable or satellite television, before the internet. Days when the prospect of having books delivered for a nominal fee to a tiny electronic device you could hold in the palm of your hand would have seemed like science fiction. Despite a shortage of the science fiction and fantasy stories that were my favorites, I loved Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. 

Until, that is, I left home, first for college, then work, and discovered libraries not hidden in dreary basements. Whole stores devoted to books. Intellectually-snobbish classmates and co-workers to whom I soon learned not to mention that I had read such and such a book in its condensed version. Until I became such an intellectual snob myself, forgetting that those abridged books had once been a lifeline. 

On visits back to small hometown, I found the county library had a more pleasant home—with windows—but secretly sneered upon seeing that it populated the blank places on its now spacious shelves with volumes of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.

I even forgot I had ever loved them. Forgot the stories they contained. True, they didn’t tend toward the startling. But a great deal of my forgetfulness, I now realize, was due to my own too-young tastes. When I looked through a list of titles in Wikipedia’s article on the series, I was amazed to find many I’ve read and loved as an adult in their full-length versions.

When I had the sad final duty several years ago of cleaning out my parents’ house, I packed box after box of those Reader’s Digest Condensed Books to take to my local used book store. Because, although typically disdained by serious readers, old copies are in demand for what interior decorators term “books by the yard,” readily available also on Amazon and ebay (the source of today’s illustration) to fill bookshelves in model homes and theme restaurants. And for photo shoots in interior decoration magazines.

Sometimes when I’m in a used bookstore, I come across a volume and admire the simple graphic beauty of its design. Maybe one day, I’ll pick one off the shelf, and read.