LISTEN FOR PLEASURE – DURKIN HAYES – DHAUDIO – PAPERBACK AUDIO
The story of Listen For Pleasure (aka Durkin Hayes, aka Paperback Audio, aka DHAudio) is one of greatness and sadness. Listen For Pleasure actually started off as a spin-off of a “budget record company” called Music For Pleasure. The launch began in October 1977. Later articles indicate that the company was owned by EMI in the 1980s. What is clear is that the company died in 2001. Listen For Pleasure aimed squarely at the retail market though many abridged cassette titles could be found in Canadian libraries. Their innovative “Paperback Audio” imprint made audiobooks collectable and affordable – offering single cassette unabridged audiobooks (60 to 90 minutes) at an affordable $4.99 price point. Prior to the name change, from Durkin Hayes to DHaudio, the company boasted a catalogue of more than 200 two and four cassette audiobooks.
1984 Listen For Pleasure catalogue |PDF|
1984 Listen For Pleasure catalogue |PDF|
1995 Durkin Hayes Audio catalogue |PDF|
199? Paperback Audio catalogue |PDF|
199? Backlist catalogue |PDF|
1998 DH Audio Backlist Catalog |PDF|
January – June 1999 catalogue |PDF|
July – December 1999 catalogue |PDF|
January – June 2000 catalogue |PDF|
July – December 2000 catalogue |PDF|
July – December 2001 catalogue |PDF|
2002 Post bankruptcy listing of inventory |PDF|
2002 Post bankruptcy listing of inventory|PDF|
Doctor Zhivago
By Boris Pasternak; Abridged by Edward Phillips; Read by Paul Scofield
2 Cassettes – Approx. 3 Hours [ABRIDGED]
Publisher: Music For Pleasure / Listen For Pleasure
Published: 1979
Product Number: LFP7054
ISBN:
Doctor Zhivago has been described as ‘a poet’s novel’, for it is very fragmentary in its form. However the connecting images and episodes describe with great feeling the effect of the Russian Revolution on a variety pf characters, but in particular on a sensitive young doctor. Zhivago’s early optimism is steadily ground into disillusionment as his life is turned inside out by the events of the war and the post-revolutionary era. Being neither an anti-revolutionary nor an ardent believer in the new order, Zhivago finds himself a man lost in the middle of a great chaos.
Brave New World
By Aldous Huxley; Abridged by Sam Curtis; Read by Edward Woodward
2 Cassettes – Approx. 2 Hours [ABRIDGED]
Publisher: Music For Pleasure / Listen For Pleasure
Published: 1979
Product Number: LFP7047
ISBN:
The world of Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne is one where human beings are brewed from test tubes and then conditioned to accept the duties of their predestined castes in society. It is a world of soma tablets and ultimate stability. Morality, art, religion, love, pain, parenthood; these are all things oif the distant past and only exist among the uncivilized savages in the remote New Mexican reservation. It was on this reservation that John was raised, – indeed, was actually “born” – and he finds himself a true misfit in the Brave New World.