FSogol's 2018 Advent Calendar Day 21: The Christmas Tale Spoken Record That Launched the Audiobook

[FSogol]

Last edited Sat Dec 22, 2018, 09:59 AM - Edit history (1)

It was 5 in the morning, and just back from a party, Dylan Thomas answered the phone in his room at the Chelsea Hotel. Barbara Holdridge, 22, had decided to launch a record company and she had an offer for the poet. Over lunch the following week with Holdridge and her business partner, Marianne Mantell, both recent graduates of New York’s Hunter College, Thomas took the deal: $500 upfront, plus 10 percent of sales above 1,000 albums, for a reading of his verse.

“He was mesmerizing,” Holdridge, now 87 years old, recalls. The 1952 disc, Thomas’ buttery reading of his beloved A Child’s Christmas in Wales on its B-side, would sell 400,000-plus copies, birthing a new popular literary form—the spoken word record, antecedent to today’s audiobook.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/christmas-tale-first-audiobook-180961152/#uliODPmDLIxLVDQ0.99

Holdridge and Mantell sold the company to Raytheon in 1970, and today Caedmon lives on within HarperCollins, which acquired it in 1987. Even now it issues new recordings alongside its classic catalog.

Holdridge is still proud of the labor of love that helped set the stage for today’s multibillion-dollar audiobook industry, whose users are on track to listen to well over two billion hours of audio in 2016. “For years at parties we’d talk about what we did and people would say, ‘Dylan Thomas! I grew up on those recordings!’”

About the story itself:

A Child's Christmas in Wales is a piece of prose by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas recorded by Thomas in 1952. Emerging from an earlier piece he wrote for BBC Radio, the work is an anecdotal reminiscence of a Christmas from the viewpoint of a young boy, portraying a nostalgic and simpler time. It is one of Thomas's most popular works.

As with his poetry, A Child's Christmas in Wales does not have a tight narrative structure but instead uses descriptive passages in a fictionalized autobiographical style, designed to create an emotive sense of the nostalgia Thomas is intending to evoke, remembering a Christmas from the viewpoint of the author as a young boy. Thomas searches for a nostalgic belief in Christmases past, for example with, "It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas", furthering his idyllic memory of childhood by describing the snow as being better and more exciting than the snow experienced as an adult. The dissertation, with exaggerated characters for comedic effect, show how childhood memories are enlarged through youthful interpretation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Child%27s_Christmas_in_Wales

Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "And death shall have no dominion"; the 'play for voices' Under Milk Wood; and stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He became widely popular in his lifetime and remained so after his premature death at the age of 39 in New York City. By then he had acquired a reputation, which he had encouraged, as a "roistering, drunken and doomed poet".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_Thomas



(For an explanation of my advent project and a link to last years posts, see
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10181152160 )