Records: Hear All About It

On the shelves of U.S. record stores, supermarkets and drug stores, there is a multiplying variety of long-playing albums apparently aimed at all the jolly clods whose upper and lower lips wrestle while they read. These Records for Illiterates—there are hundreds—give the word on everything from Human Fertility to Communist Trickery; they tell how toTrain Your Dog, fly an airplane, ride a horse; they even advise, in ministerial tones, what to do If the Bomb Falls.

Aspiring salesmen buy The Magic Word; teen-age girls are particularly fond of The Sound of Beauty, which comes with a make-up kit. But for the all-round illiterate the new vistas are unlimited: Improve Your Etiquette; Plan the Perfect Dinner Party; Achieve Sexual Harmony in Marriage; Skin Dive; Tell Your Children the Facts of Life.

Nuzzling Birds. New York Times Financial Columnist Burton Crane has put out an album called Stock Market Profits for the Sophisticated Investor, presumably for the investor who is not sophisticated enough to read Crane’s columns or books. Occupying six twelve-inch sides, it is as long as many complete operas, is salted with Crane’s forthright advice: “Get the hell out at the first sign of high water.”

Sex, of course, is Topic A, and a new recording on the subject is Live with Love, starring British Psychologist Keith Cammeron, soon to be released in the U.S. On the album jacket there is a woodland scene that includes one full-breasted wench, two nuzzling birds and three enormous bees. Inside is the sort of sex-education lecture that would weight the eyelids of a twelve-year-old (“Let’s begin with the egg…”), redeemed now and then by snippets of fascinating information, such as the fact that the male testicle, in Cammeron’s words, is actually “a mass of tiny tubes which if stretched in a line would extend from Lands End to John o’ Groat’s.”

Lush, Be a Lady. In Conquer Your Alcoholism, Edward J. McGoldrick, billed as “Your Confidential Adviser” and actually director of the New York City Bureau of Alcoholic Therapy, is tough and blunt. “You are not sick,” he snarls in Groove One. “You are a flop, a failure, a drunk.” But in a companion volume called Tormented Women, the Truth About the Female Alcoholic, he becomes almost gallant, sympathetically acknowledging how difficult it must have been for his listener to buy the record. “You probably said it was for a friend. You couldn’t allow even a total stranger—the saleman—to suspect that you, this nice-looking lady, was a lush.”

Who buys these records? Some of the country’s best-known big companies (General Electric, Ford, TWA, IBM) go in heavily for salesmanship recordings, which are now published in short, 6½-minute segments. “We did have 30-minute records, but they were too hard to comprehend,” explains the manufacturer. People with new false teeth buy copies of Your New Smile, sold through dental supply houses. But in the main, although sales are tumbling along healthily, it is difficult to say just who does buy most of them. It is simpler to say why the records are made. With a one-man cast and no acoustical problems, talking records can be stamped off and jacketed for as little as 65¢ apiece, to sell for prices ranging from $1.98 to $5.98.