Flo Gibson, Grande Dame Of Audiobooks Dies

Flo Gibson, who for decades read soothingly
to Americans as they toiled at the gym, behind the wheel or over
housework, died on Jan. 7 at her home in Washington. Mrs.
Gibson, the universally acknowledged grande dame of audiobooks,
was 86.
The cause was cancer, her daughter Carrie Gibson said. At her
death, Mrs. Gibson was halfway through taping 'Les Miserables1'
which would have been, give or take a title or two, the 1,134th
recorded book of her career.
Mrs. Gibson was the founder of, and chief reader for, Audio
Book Contractors, which she ran for nearly three decades from a
specially built recording studio in the basement of her home.
The company produces audiobooks for sale to libraries and
individual consumers.
Audio Book Contractors, which specializes in unabridged
recordings of the classics, seeks out an audience for whom a
well-told story on tape and the latest bodice-ripper tend to be
mutually exclusive. (That said, Mrs. Gibson did record 'East
Lynne1' an 1861 novel by Mrs. Henry Wood that The Chicago
Tribune once cheerfully described as 'riveting Victorian smut.')
Known for her impeccable diction -- she was a former radio
actress -- and scrupulous fealty to the text, Mrs. Gibson
narrated everything from 'The Wind in the Willows' to capacious
adult books like 'Pride and Prejudice' (11 hours, 41 minutes) and
'Middlemarch1' which spans 31 hours, 7 minutes, over 24
cassettes, an effort that took her more than 10 weeks in the
studio.
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-1970's 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 Karenina1'
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 Bronte 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.
Her scrapbooks of fan mail attest to the results. An
upholsterer's assistant once wrote Mrs. Gibson to say that her
'Pride and Prejudice' had made 'the stitches melt down into
insignificance' as she labored over an antique chair.
Florence Corona Anderson was born in San Francisco on Feb. 7,
1924. After earning a bachelor's degree in dramatic literature
from the University of California, Berkeley, she studied with the
noted acting teacher Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood
Playhouse in New York.
She acted in several West Coast radio serials -- including 'Pat
Novak for Hire1' which starred a young Jack Webb -- before
marrying Carlos Gibson, a Peruvian diplomat, and raising four
children.
Soon after her youngest child left for college, Mrs. Gibson
auditioned for the Library of Congress and was accepted. She
later narrated books on tape for several commercial producers
before starting Audio Book Contractors in 1983.
As Mrs. Gibson discovered, a narrator's experience of
literature differs crucially from a civilian's. Though she
adored Henry James, she was often moved to shake her fist and
shout at him: 'Why don't you punctuate? Why don't you paragraph?
She invariably forgave him, though, and recorded much of his
work.
Mrs. Gibson's husband, whom she married in 1947, died in 1989.
Besides her daughter Carrie, she is survived by two other
daughters, Nancy Gibson, known as Derry, and Katherine Gibson
Bolland; a brother, Buck Anderson; and three grandchildren. A
son, Chris, died in 1985.
Audio Book Contractors, which offers hundreds of books on tape
and CD, continues to operate. Many of its titles, including
dozens narrated by Mrs. Gibson, can also be purchased as digital
downloads from audible.com.
What with treadmills and traffic and troublesome chairs, her
voice will soothe listeners for decades to come.