Family Library of Great Music

I was going through my collection of vinyl recently and in particular the classical music section when I came across a dozen or so of these records. I gave a few a spin.

The Family Library of Great Music: A Treasury of the World's Great Composers, Their Lives, Music and Times was a collection of inexpensive classical music albums that were available on a display rack in supermarkets in the mid 1970's. They were produced by RCA for Funk & Wagnalls.

Each week there was a new featured album at the primary spot on the display rack near the checkout counter right next to the stacks of National Enquirer and the other sleazy tabloid papers. It was a weird clash of cultures in a Philadelphia supermarket checkout line. Classical music as a marketing impulse item.

Becky and I wanted to add some classical music to our collection but we were both college students at the time so this was a good way to do that inexpensively. Each week we would buy a new album for a couple of bucks. There would always be a new one on display. I checked the dates on the records and most of them have a 1977 copyright so it was probably that year when we acquired most of these albums. 

According to the packaging there were 22 albums in the series. It looks like the last one we got was #18. It also says there was a Great Composers biography booklet in each album but none of ours has it. Perhaps they are on a bookshelf somewhere in our house but they are not with the records now.

Becky was a lot more familiar with classical music than I was at the time and for me much of this was a learning experience to get that deep into it. A few years later we would significantly expand our classical music collection and have many high quality albums from companies like Deutsche Grammophon. We still have many classical music LPs and still even more CDs. I also downloaded many albums over the years and now I listen to many new classical albums on Spotify.

Also during those college years if we were spending money on buying records we would usually be getting the latest music we were especially interested in and exploring like jazz, blues and reggae.