Naxos AudioBooks
From Classic to Contemporary Naxos AudioBooks was founded in 1994 by Klaus Heymann and Nicolas Soames with the primary purpose of recording the great classics of literature on CD and cassette — with carefully chosen classical music to enhance the productions. James Joyce, Milton, Malory, Homer, Woolf, Austen, the Brontës and Dickens were among the authors who featured from the start. With key non-fiction works (such as Gibbons’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), as well as audio drama (notably Shakespeare) and a wide range of junior classics, the tone and pattern of the label was set. It began winning awards in its very first year. With nearly 400 recordings now available, its commitment to literature continues. Over the years the emphasis has changed from abridged recordings to unabridged, starting with the key release of the unabridged Ulysses for the centenary of Bloomsday in 2004 — fortuitously, the 10th anniversary of the label. This led to the Complete Classics series of unabridged recordings, epitomised by an outstanding performance of War and Peace (61 hours, 51 CDs) by Neville Jason. Since then Naxos AudioBooks has continued to be at the cutting edge. This year has seen the launch of its own download shop, offering quality downloads of all the recordings. The catalogue includes: CLASSIC FICTION: Austen (all six) Dickens (10 titles to date); Doyle (The SherlockHolmes canon); Flaubert (Madame Bovary); Joyce (all the major works including Ulysses) Melville (Moby-Dick, Billy Budd); Proust (The Remembrance of Things Past); Tolstoy (War and Peace, Anna Karenina); Twain (Huckleberry Finn)
CONTEMPORARY FICTION: Haruki Murakami (six titles including The Wind-up Bird Chronicle); Samuel Beckett (The Trilogy)
POETRY: Homer (Iliad and Odyssey); Dante (The Divine Comedy); Milton (Paradise Lost); Chaucer (Selections from The Canterbury Tales in Middle English and modern translation); Hardy; Yeats
DRAMA: Shakespeare (10 plays); Beckett (Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape); Coward, Ibsen, Shaw, Sophocles, Wilde
NON-FICTION: Plato (The Republic, Symposium); Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra); Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire); The Voice of the Buddha; The History of the Theatre; The History of Classical Music; Pepys, Plutarch, Suetonius
JUNIOR CLASSCS: King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; Just So Stories; Tales from the Greek Legends; The Story of Classical Music; Our Island Story; Black Beauty
THE NAXOS AUDIOBOOKS DOWNLOAD SHOP: All titles are available from www.naxosaudiobooks.com in good-quality zipped MP3 files, easily transferable to iPod/MP3 players. Full index points, notes and covers all included.
AWARDS: Among many awards, Naxos AudioBooks was Audiobook Publisher of the Year in the UK in 2001 and 2005; it has also won key awards in the US’s APA awards.
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