It was a typical day at school around 1979. Having strategically feigned a sprained ankle in order to get out of cross-country running, I was confined to the library with the suggestion that I could maybe do some homework (for once). Instead, I noticed a book, that would (for once) actually change at least part of my life. The Reader’s Digest Book of Strange Stories and Amazing Facts (hereafter RDSSAF) sang to me like a shelf-bound siren. Its cover alone grabbed my attention – some fops being startled by another fop riding a bear into a Georgian dining room; a snake eating an egg; what looked like Charles Dickens with a big shard of something; and the incredible melting man (actually a Kirlian photograph, but I didn’t know that then).
Opening the front cover, it promised “Stories that are bizarre, unusual, odd, astonishing, incredible… but true” (yeah, we’ll come back to that). Having already used 25 per cent of the book’s superlative allocation, I flipped to the contents and the very first thing that struck me was of the same era: in those far-off days of the 1970s under the joint and several editorship of the McWhirters, the book always contained a great deal of narrative and exposition (I particularly remember the 1973 edition, which had a several-page article on very tall and heavy people): it was actually readable, as opposed to the later versions which are more like a factual edition of . Even the layout was similar, with considered categories: Part 1 was about the natural world and space, Part 2 about human discovery and endeavour and part 5 – “The World Of Tomorrow” – had the usual hilariously inaccurate predictions of how we all live now, what with our flying cars, meals in tablet form and holograms. (One of my personal favourites the hoverbed for burns patients, on which patients had to remain absolutely flat and prone, as if they turned on their side they’d fly off into the nurses’ station). On the other hand, the power and use of computers is drastically underestimated and the Internet wasn’t even a dream. However, we all know nothing dates faster than the future and it would be unfair to criticise what was actually a best guess, and given the contributors list – Patrick Moore, Magnus Magnusson and Isaac Asimov among them – this wasn’t just thrown together.
