*"A classic is something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to read."* --Mark Twain
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Reader’s Digest books, but are they similar to Great Illustrated Classics? I used to love those when I was really, really young.
I remember Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. My grandmother had a number of them, and she would let me borrow them if I found something interesting in them.
For the most part, I found that RD did best at condensing non-fiction. You got the high points, and little of the fluff and filler. For example, I particularly remember On High Steel: The Education of an Ironworker, which followed a man as he learned to work on skyscrapers; and Report from Engine Company 82, about a fire station’s adventures as they battled fires in New York City. They were non-fiction, but they were exciting, and a great way to pass a rainy afternoon.
I found that fiction, on the other hand, suffered at the hands of the RD editors. I have few specific memories, because I mostly gave up on the RD version and got the full edition from the public library; but I do recall that RD’s version of Orwell’s 1984 ended well before O’Brien and Room 101 entered the picture.
Children’s Digest was the version for kids. My parents bought a subscription for me to this for some years and I loved it. I adored the variety and having all of it in one convenient package (to read under the covers at night). Book excerpts, comics, stories, etc. I often would look up the books later so I could read the whole thing. Some of those would have been a bit daunting if I hadn’t read the Digest version first. Some years afterwards I did the same thing when I discovered my Aunt’s Condensed Books collection.
It occurs to me that I have a large number of anthologies in my library even now. I guess I really do like to mix it up. Variety is the spice of life?
I think the Reader’s Digest books are abridged for children, and for adults who don’t want their own sensibilities shocked. Parents can hand over any of them for their kids to read confident that any sexually or otherwise explicit scenes have bee removed or drastically toned down.
It was the pre-techno equivalent of Parental Controls on TV sets, except that the parents were controlling their own “viewing” as well as that of their kids’. We had a bookshelf full of them when I was a kid, but I also spent a lot of time at the local library, read some of the unabridged versions, and began to think it was all about removing “dangerous” ideas. As a teenager, I couldn’t get over the idea that it was done out of some kind of conservative religious motivation.
I did wonder if some sort of “Dangerous Ideas removal” might have had something to do with it - abridging popular books to take out the naughty parts, swear words and progressive ideas seems like the sort of thing that would appeal to someone’s stereotypical Grandparents From Another Era.