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Founder's vision inspires 50 years of great listening for children

BY TIM DITLOW
Vice President and Publisher, Listening Library

The world was a very different place when my parents, Anthony and Helen Ditlow, founded Listening Library, a company dedicated to recording quality literature for young listeners. The commercial "talking book" business produced on long-playing vinyl records was just getting started in the greater New York area, and my parents believed that everyone, and that certainly included kids, would enjoy listening to this new medium. Back in 1955 my father, a former teacher, had just found out that he had an optic nerve disease and was going to lose his eyesight. Producing recordings, my parents felt, was a smart career move for my father as he wouldn't be dependent on his sight. They plunged right in with their first recording of Around the World in 80 Days, which tied into the 1955 film starring David Niven.

The company struggled for years to find a home for its unabridged recordings of classic literature, selling to outlets ranging from record shops to libraries to a few brave bookstores. The big break came with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society Era. Suddenly, there was a huge demand from school systems and public libraries for all the curriculum-related titles my father had been quietly producing over the years. Teachers were the first to recognize that having their students listen to the works of Poe, Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Bradbury was a perfect way to bring these great stories to life in the classroom.

By the time I joined the company in 1979, the Sony Walkman had been invented, and I persuaded my father to convert our backlist record titles to the audiocassette format so that people could listen on the go. That's the wonderful aspect of this business—as long as you create a high-quality master you can easily transfer your recordings to whatever new technology comes along. My father's original master recording of Lord of the Flies, narrated by the author Sir William Golding, has moved from record to cassette to CD and is now available as a digital download.

Listening is an art form, but more importantly, learning to listen has finally been recognized as a skill set integral to literacy. In fact, demand from teachers for more recordings for younger students was so great that I started signing up many of the top children's writers of the day, ranging from Beverly Cleary to Judy Blume to Richard Peck. Parents began to realize what teachers had known for years, and that led to our expansion into bookstores.

Finally, by the 1990s, many consumers and booksellers had become fans of the medium as they discovered that a children's audiobook was the perfect companion for a car trip. And then in 1998 I read a manuscript from London about a certain boy wizard. I can only imagine how pleased my father would have been knowing that more than four million people have purchased the Harry Potter series on audio. The next Potter audio, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, read by Jim Dale, will be released to eager fans on July 16.

Dad's original vision, spelled out on the back record jacket of Around the World in 80 Days, was that listening to a book was like having "a personal friend reading aloud—flawlessly, tirelessly, and with dramatic feeling." Fifty years later, that vision still holds true, and recordings of Charlotte's Web, Because of Winn Dixie and Holes still feel like personal friends helping children enjoy a story well told.

Editor's Note: In 1999 Tim sold Listening Library to Random House, where it operates as an imprint of Random House Audio, releasing more than 75 new children's and young adult audiobooks a year. Helen Ditlow will be honored by the Audio Publishers Association at the Audie Awards this month with a special Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of her pioneering work in the audiobook industry.