Listen to "Love Conquers All" Online

You can now listen to Benchley's second book,  Love Conquers All, for free online at www.librivox.org. This wonderful site features recordings of over 1500 public-domain books read by volunteers. You can listen to streaming audio, or download mp3 files and/or podcasts. The Benchley offering is here. (Actually, this link is to the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/index.php), which indexes many audio sites in addition to librivox.org, so it's a good place to start exploring the wide variety of public domain recordings available on the web). 

Since all the librivox readers are volunteers, the quality varies from book to book. But fortunately, the reader of Love Conquers All is very good. See the complete librivox catalog here. 

Librivox welcomes volunteer readers, so, as more of the Benchley books enter the public domain, perhaps some of you out there in blogland will volunteer to do a reading. It would be great fun (if you can keep a straight face while reading Benchley -- no mean feat!)

The Internet archive also contains a link to a fascinating "movies for the blind" version of the complete soundtrack of the (now public domain) 1945 movie, The Stork Club, featuring Robert Benchley. It's available here for streaming or for downloading as three mp3 files. Each file has an excellent voiceover that unobtrusively describes what's happening onscreen, effectively turning the soundtrack into a self-contained "radio" show (They even read all the credits at the beginning). The main "movies for the blind" site is here. There aren't all that many movies available yet, but I highly recommend it.

(By the way, there's quite a bit of old-time radio material on the archive site. See for example the Henry Morgan shows here.)

- Chris Morgan