Need last minute help on a strange Christmas gift
December 20, 2017 12:40 PM   Subscribe

My wife and I are big fans of My Favorite Murder and by proxy, Mind Hunter. She brought up the fact that Ed Kemper at one point recorded a lot of audiobooks and that it would be so neat and creepy to have.

I was hoping I could procure her something he read and put it on a flash drive, a CD, cassette, something, but the only things I've been able to find are EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE resellers on Amazon or a snippet of "Flowers in the Attic" which as I understand it, maybe not the best thing to have an Ed Kemper be the one reading to you? I understand he did a few others. Any help?
posted by ThrowbackDave to Media & Arts (4 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Have you tried your local library? I get all of my audio books from there.
posted by BoscosMom at 2:07 PM on December 20, 2017


I imagine the reason they're so difficult to come by is because although he made hundreds of recordings, he recorded them as part of a program for libraries for the blind and thus they were never available commercially. In fact, libraries for the blind have a lot of seemingly bizarre and backwards hoops they have to jump through to keep their non-commercial audiobooks from being copied and distributed outside their very tight environment, or they risk losing their (already begrudgingly granted) permissions from publishers to create them.

Your best bet for listening to one is to know someone who is a patron at a library for the blind, and hope they're up for letting you listen along. (You could try going through someone who works at such a library, but in my experience very few librarians/library staffmembers would ever risk something that could end up hurting their patrons.) You'd then also need to know specifically which books to ask for, which isn't as easy as it sounds.
posted by lovecrafty at 2:11 PM on December 20, 2017 [3 favorites]


Edit-not-edit: also, the 'regular' public library buys commercially produced audiobooks for their collections. They are not allowed to use the non-commercial audiobooks produced for libraries for the blind.
posted by lovecrafty at 2:16 PM on December 20, 2017


I don't know if this would be helpful or not, but I live near the campus where many of the "Charlottesville" campus shots in Mindhunter were filmed. If there were anything locally here that would be of some value, DM me.
posted by el_lupino at 4:19 PM on December 20, 2017


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