Excerpt: Today, thousands of audiobooks appear annually — read by authors, celebrities and professional voice-over artists — and other companies besides hers do the classics. But Mrs. Gibson’s work, colleagues say, was notable on several counts.
For one thing, she was an early entrant in the field, starting out in the mid-1970s recording talking books for the blind for the Library of Congress. She went on to found Audio Book Contractors well before recorded books were commonplace in stores and libraries.
For another, she was almost certainly the field’s most prolific practitioner. A busy voice-over artist might typically narrate several hundred books in a career; to record more than 1,100, as Mrs. Gibson did, is almost beyond contemplation.
What was more, reviewers agreed that if one were to invest, say, the 36 hours and 7 minutes required to hear “Anna Karenina,” then there was no better voice to hear it in than Mrs. Gibson’s: deep and throaty, it evoked a firm but favorite schoolteacher and let her juggle men’s and women’s roles with ease.
Mrs. Gibson was also praised for her meticulous preparation (to tackle the Brontë sisters, she haunted Yorkshire to soak up dialect) and for the intimate compact that appeared to exist between her and the listener. As she often said, she approached every narration as if she were playing to an audience of one.
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