Unusual Materials
7-inch 331⁄3 "flexi disc" records were seen occasionally. One common use was as inserts in books that included audio supplements. LP recordings could be made on very thin, flexible sheets of vinyl (or laminated paper), and this was sometimes done for a mixture of practical utility and novelty appeal. At least one "magazine" was published with a spiral binding, a hole punched through the entire magazine, and four or five of these flexible recordings bound into the magazine. The magazine could be opened to one of these recordings and turned back upon itself; then the entire magazine placed on a turntable and the record could be played. In the early days of personal computers, when programs were commonly stored on audio cassettes, at least one computer magazine published "floppy ROMs," which were bound-in thin plastic 331⁄3 RPM audio recordings of computer data, to be played on a turntable and dubbed onto an audio cassette. It was also possible to load them into the computer directly if the record player were connected to the computer's cassette (analog signal) input port.
Flexi discs or soundsheets were often provided by music publishers to their customers, frequently school band and orchestra directors, marching band and drum corps leaders and others, with their printed catalogs of sheet music. The director could then hear a sample recording of the piece as they looked at an excerpt from the musical score.
Paper records were pioneered in the 1930s by Hit of the Week Records and Durium Records. Laminated cardboard records have also been produced as promotional materials, most notably on the backs of cereal boxes in the late 1960s.
"Melody Cards" were popular in the late 1950s. These took the form of an oversized rectangular postcard with the usual address and greeting space on one side and an illustration on the other. The illustration was overlaid with a transparent plastic material into which the grooves were embossed for the recording which was usually musical as the name implies. They typically played at 45 RPM. It was not recommended to write on them with a ball point pen, but these were not all that common at the time.
Chocolate records about three inches in diameter, and small players made for them, were marketed as a novelty in Europe in 1903-1904. After a record wore out or ceased to amuse, it could be eaten.
Read more about this topic: Unusual Types Of Gramophone Records
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