Unusual types of gramophone records Sievey. 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. In 1973, the Kingdom of Bhutan issued several unusual postage stamps that are playable miniature phonograph records. These thin plastic single-sided adhesive-backed 33 RPM discs feature folk music and tourism information. Not very practical for actual postal use and rarely seen canceled, they were designed as revenue-generating novelties and were initially scorned as such by most stamp collectors. Their small diameters (approximately 7 and
Unusual types of gramophone records 10 cm or 2.75 and 4 inches) make them unplayable on turntables with automatic return tonearms. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1960s, bootleg copies of banned Western music were individually recorded onto used medical x-ray film and sold on the black market. These were called "ribs" or 'Roentgenizdat'. The first discs by Berliner Gramophone were black, and that has been the standard color for gramophone records in times subsequent. As early as 1899, the Vitaphone Talking Machine Co. made records that were brownish-red in color. The American Record Company produced records made of blue shellac for their