World's Largest Collection of Authors on Vinyl Up for Sale

The National Post has a story about a man obsessed with collecting authors on records.

From the piece...

In some ways, it began with Dylan Thomas. In 1952, two young New Yorkers, Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Roney, heard him read at the 92nd Street Y. They were so impressed by the Welsh poet that they invited him to record his work the following day. Thomas only had enough material to fill one side of the record, so someone rushed out to get a copy of Harper’s Bazaar, which had printed one of his stories. “And that’s the only reason we have ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ recorded,” says Gatenby. That was the first release by Caedmon Records and Dylan Thomas Reading, Volume 1 might be the first audiobook.

Gatenby’s collection is exhaustive, containing almost every major writer and literary figure of the 20th century: T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ayn Rand, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley, Vladimir Nabokov, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, James Joyce, Robert Frost, Eudora Welty, E.M. Forster, John Steinbeck, Pablo Neruda, Dorothy Parker, Albert Camus, Mordecai Richler and Margaret Atwood. Gatenby owns Kurt Vonnegut reading Slaughterhouse-Five; Tennessee Williams reading from The Glass Menagerie, with a cover by Andy Warhol; Bertolt Brecht’s testimony before the Committee on Un-American Activity and Maya Angelou billed as “Miss Calypso.” Many have never been opened, most are in mint condition. “They didn’t get played over like The Beatles,” says Gatenby.