First recorded in the 1970s by prolific NLS narrator Ray Hagen, the beloved novel was rerecorded by Hagen in the late 1990s due to deterioration of the aging tapes. Nearly a decade after his death, this remains the case, protective as he and his estate have always been of rights to his work. Salinger’s death in 2010, I had no idea that the NLS version of Catcher in the Rye I had read was the only audiobook of that novel in existence. The National Library Service, however, had one thing commercial publishers did not: permission to record any books it wished as long as those books were never available outside the library. Revenue for books on tape reached $200 million in 1987 and $1.5 billion in 1995, according to Publishers Weekly. The commercial market for audiobooks, once little more than LP records of poetry and short plays, grew exponentially with the advent of cassette tapes. The NLS motto, “That all may read,” appears today at the top of their home page. As users increased, so did the number and variety of books in the collection. In the 1960s, the Library of Congress extended the service to patrons with any physical disability preventing them from reading print. An even smaller number of selections was, and continues to be, available in Braille. Instead, she left her desk to retrieve both books.įounded in 1931 after an act of Congress, the National Library Service’s talking book program initially recorded a limited number of general-interest books on vinyl for the blind. She asked if I wanted to check out any additional books, and I named a couple of novels, expecting her to apologize for not having them. The librarian on duty handed me a heavy cassette player I’d need for their half-speed, four-track tapes along with a green carton containing East of Eden, which we’d be reading in senior English. Rather than the public library, doctors directed us to the West Virginia Library Commission, a regional office of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped.
When doctors my junior year of high school characterized my recent vision loss as untreatable, the poor selection of books on tape didn’t foreshadow my future as a book lover. The library’s audiobook shelves also held some recent bestsellers and a smattering of classics like those assigned by my English teachers, few of which I ever finished. She worked in sales, and the audience for books on tape was primarily people who spent a lot of time in cars and 18-wheelers. Titles like Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale and Awaken the Giant Within found their way onto the floorboard of my mom’s Civic. In the early 1990s, the books on tape section of our public library comprised a spinning rack much smaller than the one 7-Eleven used for comic books.
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