Cheating death by freezing. The power of the Evil Eye. The giants of Easter Island. The legend of Spring-Heeled Jack. Oh, I was quite the interesting second grader to talk to. I couldn’t rattle off a single sports statistic, but I knew all about Bigfoot, fire walking, and how long we have until the sun destroys the earth. <\/p>\n

(Don’t worry; we’re good for roughly a billion years.)<\/p>\n

All of these facts I learned from Strange Stories, Amazing Facts<\/i>, published by Reader’s Digest in 1976. My dad received a copy of this book from a co-worker and for many years I read stories from it almost every single night. The book contains hundreds of articles, ranging in length from just a few paragraphs to about two pages. I had a couple of kid books about UFOs and Bigfoot, but this was the real deal — a book for GROWN UPS about all kinds of mysteries!<\/p>\n

Strange Stories, Amazing Facts<\/i> must have sold well for Reader’s Digest, because they continued to crank out similar books for over a decade. Here are the four I’ve picked up throughout the years.<\/p>\n

STRANGE STORIES, AMAZING FACTS
\n608 pages (1976)<\/b><\/p>\n

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For me, Strange Stories, Amazing Facts<\/i> is the granddaddy of them all, the book that set the template for all the Reader’s Digest books that followed. The book is divided into five unnamed parts, with each part consisting of a few related sub-categories. For example, “Part 3” consists of “Strange customs and superstitions,” “Popular facts and fallacies,” “Intriguing and unsolved mysteries,” “Footsteps into the unknown,” and “Legendary lands and beasts.” Each sub-category runs 30-40 pages in length. Each story is roughly the length of a page, give or take, with lots of pull outs and illustrations to accompany them. Also, each story is presented as a unique article with its own headline, which makes it easy to flip open to a random page and begin reading.<\/p>\n

Like the title suggests, the stories fall into one of two categories. Half of the articles contain strange and obscure facts. There’s nothing particularly mysterious about cryogenics or the Roman Colosseum; they’re just interesting to read about. The rest of the book focuses on unsolved mysteries: UFOs, Bigfoot, haunted houses, and so on. <\/p>\n

The article pictured above is about the infamous Oak Island money pit. Who knew 40 years after this book was published people would still be digging up that island and have a reality television show dedicated to it!<\/p>\n

The thing I like — and don’t like — about these books is that none of the mysteries are debunked. Some of the specific UFO cases and ghost stories included have long since been debunked, which dates the material. Even so, the stories are fun to read through.<\/p>\n

INTO THE UNKNOWN
\n352 pages (1981)<\/B><\/p>\n

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The next book in my Reader’s Digest collection is Into the Unknown<\/i>. This book does away with the five “parts” and simply uses chapters to group stories together. Many of the chapters, such as “Monsters,” “Ghosts and Spirits,” and “Enigma of UFO’s” are similar to the previous book. In between those we have new topics such as “Art of Magic” and an entire section dedicated to Atlantis.<\/p>\n

Unlike Strange Stories, Amazing Facts<\/i>, which is 10″ x 7.5″, Into the Unknown<\/i> is a full-sized 8.5″ x 11″ book. The larger pages, combined with almost half as many pages as its predecessor, make the book feel considerably thinner. It feels like a typical hardback book, whereas Strange Stories<\/i> looks and feels almost like a reference book.<\/p>\n

Most of the articles in Into the unknown<\/i> are longer that the ones in Strange Stories<\/i>. Some of the articles run up to ten pages in length, although the text is still broken up by pull-outs, photographs, and illustrations. Many of the same pictures from Strange Stories<\/i> have been recycled here. Even though the new material is good, it’s easy to get the feeling that you’re getting half a book of new material, combined with highlights from the previous edition.<\/p>\n

I didn’t own this book as a kid, but our local library had a copy of it. My favorite part to read was about dreams — interpretations, astral projection, and lucid dreaming. I used to go to the library and read these stories to my girlfriend. Just kidding. No fifth grader who read books about lucid dreaming had a girlfriend.<\/p>\n

MYSTERIES OF THE UNEXPLAINED
\n320 pages (1982)<\/B><\/p>\n

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Released only a year after Into the Unknown<\/i>, this Reader’s Digest book consists of even more of the same. The chapter titles become increasing familiar: “Monsters and More,” “The Unquiet Sky,” and “In the Realm of Miracles” all contain topics recycled from the two previous books. The articles haven’t been reprinted word-for-word, but it’s still hard not to get deja vu while reading about, well, deja vu.<\/p>\n

Where Strange Stories<\/i> divided each article with a headline and subhead, Mysteries of the Unexplained<\/i> uses a line break and a single bold line. This, combined again with an 8.5″ x 11″ page size, makes it feel less like a reference book and more like a long narrative that doesn’t lend itself to simply flipping the book open to a random article.<\/p>\n

Once again, many of the same pictures from the previous titles have been re-used here. In fact, having just flipped through the first two, it’s tough to find a picture I haven’t<\/i> just seen in one of the other two. Some of that is to be expected — there weren’t a lot of new photographs of the Loch Ness Monster taken between 1981 and 1982 — but even so, the repeated photographs adds to the feeling that you’ve seen this before.<\/p>\n

Mysteries of the Unexplained<\/i> is by no means a bad book. There are lots of fun and weird articles to be found inside. If you don’t own the previous two titles I mentioned and ran across this one, I’d definitely pick it up.<\/p>\n

FACTS AND FALLACIES
\n448 pages (1988)<\/B><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

The final entry in my collection of Reader’s Digest books is Facts and Fallacies<\/i>. While the title makes this one sound different than the others — almost like a Guiness-style book of facts and records — it’s very similar to the others. Like Strange Stories<\/i>, this book is also divided up into five parts. Some of the titles, like “Footsteps into the Unknown,” are identical<\/i> to Strange Stories, Amazing Facts<\/i>. <\/p>\n

The book’s size is a combination of the previous two; it’s 10″ x 8″, and 448 pages thick. <\/p>\n

Like the others, Reader’s Digest did not attempt to reinvent the wheel that moved the pyramid stones here. There are articles about the Voynich manuscript, children who claim to recall previous lives, and documented cases of spontaneous combustion. Like all the others, the book concludes with predictions about the world of tomorrow. This one speculates about self-driving cars, the ability to circumvent the globe in 80 minutes, and the uncertain future of Antarctica. <\/p>\n

I read this book in our school library, and actually purchased my copy from a library sale. The last 1\/3 of the book’s pages have come loose from the binding — I like to imagine its from years of kids digging through these books, just like I used to, wondering if they would ever find D.B. Cooper or figure out who Jack the Ripper was.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

I miss mysteries — not paperbacks or movies, but real-life mysteries. I loved wondering as a kid whether or not Bigfoot was real, or whether or not a UFO really crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. Strange Stories, Amazing Facts<\/i> fed that part of my brain as a kid. Even as an adult, many of the stories contained within that book take me back to that place and time.<\/p>\n

While looking up some facts for this article I discovered two additional Reader’s Digest books I don’t own: The World’s Last Mysteries<\/i> and Exploring the Unknown<\/i>.<\/p>\n

No mystery there; Amazon says they’ll be here by next Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cheating death by freezing. The power of the Evil Eye. The giants of Easter Island. The legend of Spring-Heeled Jack. Oh, I was quite the interesting second grader to talk to. I couldn’t rattle off a single sports statistic, but I knew all about Bigfoot, fire walking, and how long we have until the sun destroys the earth. (Don’t worry; we’re good for roughly a billion years.) All of these facts I learned from Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, published by Reader’s Digest in 1976. My dad received a copy of this book from a co-worker and for many years I… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11016,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11015"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11029,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11015\/revisions\/11029"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}