How much did shingles cost in 1963?

When Vannevar Bush proposed the memex idea back in the 1940s, he surely didn't envisage that the global marketplace the internet has become would make retrieving certain types of information so difficult.

One area fraught with problems is trying to get historical pricing information.

In researching my piece about Rhino re-inventing the concept of the EP, I wanted to find some sort of data about the relative costs of 45rpm singles, EPs and LPs during the 1950s and the 1960s.

Search after search proved fruitless^[1] - as all I could find on the web were the prices today for buying old copies of records released in the 1950s and 1960s.

Eventually I resorted to typing in a natural language query into Google, in the hope that someone somewhere had asked a similar question in an FAQ or answers service environment.

All Google did was make me laugh out loud with their inadvertently humourous spelling correction:

Did you mean: how much did shingles cost in 1963

[1] Actually this h2g2 article did give me one idea, but I didn't find anything to corroborate the figures given of 6s/8d for a single and 32s/6d for an album. [Return to article]

Posted by Martin Belam, May 18, 2007
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