Literary Recordings

Literary Recordings Literary recordings include poetry, prose stories, and plays. (For the purposes of this article, speeches and comic monologs are not included.) The earliest recordings of literature were not meant for publication. Edwin Booth made two cylinders in March 1890, in Chicago. Those recordings of a speech from Hamlet and of Othello’s speech to the senate were made for his daughter, Edwina. More than 40 years passed before those cylinders were duplicated on a 78-rpm record for mass…