Spark53:59Success, optimization, and the relentless drive toward productivity
In the pre-digital era, the latest technology of the day promised relentless improvement from the comfort of your own home. All you needed was a record player.
For instance, Living French: A Complete Language Course, released in 1955, featured images of the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, along with an earnest couple speaking to a policeman, no doubt asking “Où est Montmartre, monsieur?”
Today, these records can likely be found in crates at music stores and garage sales, or gathering dust in basements. But they were once part of a huge trend.
Designed for Success: Better Living and Self-Improvement with Midcentury Instructional Records features images of instructional records straight out of the Mad Men era, from Actual Business Letters Dictated at Various Speeds for aspiring stenographers, to Hear How to Play Winning Bridge, with Oswald Jacoby.
“Jonathan and I have known each other for our whole lives, and we have been collecting records together and writing together for many, many decades,” Janet Borgerson, who co-authored the book with her husband and writing partner Jonathan Schroeder, told Spark host Nora Young.
From vintage record covers for Secrets of Successful Varmint Calling, and Calm Nerves for Self-Confidence: Enjoy Life’s Sparkle and Zest, the book looks at instructional records about dancing, lifestyles and “success” in life.
And beyond their novelty today, these vinyl discs give a glimpse into the movement for self-improvement, particularly in the United States of the 1950s and ’60s.
“I think they’re just a really interesting window into the past. And we were attracted to records that were kind of mysterious. So we wondered, who bought these records? Who wanted a record of trying to be a successful varmint caller? And when we began to write about them, we realized that, well, each record told an interesting story,” said Schroeder, a communications professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.
“And then together, they told bigger stories about history, about our country, about… individual aspiration and so we felt like we were solving puzzles each time we found an unusual record that that didn’t make sense or we kind of said well what’s this wacky record, who was interested in that, who was the market?”