October 4th is World Animal Day. That’s a perfect excuse to get your critters an extra treat and celebrate with 10 gems from our catalog.

Imagine taking a walk with your partner, and all of a sudden she turns into an animal. This is what happens to Richard Tebrick in David Garnett’s book Lady into Fox. How long will the metamorphosis of his wife last? And will he be able to conceal it?

Living with animals is not always easy. Nor is living with people. Hear all about the household of Kiki-the-Demure and Toby-Dog, or rather that of Colette Willy, in our dramatic reading of Barks and Purrs.

Just as cats and dogs, so can men and animals be friends. In the story Told Under a White Oak Tree, we hear about the tribulations of one of the first movie actors – as told by one of his friends, Bill Hart’s Pinto Pony.

There are many instances where animals work for humans. Details about the production of honey and how to tend to bees can be found in On the Hive and the Honey Bee by L. L. Langstroth, a master bee keeper.

Many more winged creatures, albeit of the feathered kind, are described in The Bird Study Book by Thomas Gilbert Pearson. An absolute must for any (hobby) ornithologist!

When she gets lost in the Australian Bush, little Dot makes her own studies of local, marsupial wild live. Her findings are described in Dot and the Kangaroo, a charming fairytale by Ethel C. Pedley.

In reality, wild animals tend to be less social when it comes to humans. Just like the bear Wahb, who desperately tries to stay out of human reach in The Biography of a Grizzly, noted down by Ernest Thompson Seton.

The clashing of human and animal habitat is one of the reasons for Our Vanishing Wild Life. The book by William T. Hornaday, written in 1913, has never been as hot a topic as nowadays.

Very cold instead it is on Penguin Island. When a short sighted priest mistakes the birds for humans and baptizes them, they begin to establish an almost human society. Read the satirical novel by Anatole France to find out if this was a good or bad thing.

Good and bad are traits only we posess, but we readily ascribe them to animals. This is especially apparent in the Fables for the Frivolous, a modernized variant of Jean de la Fontaine’s Fables, written in verse by Guy Wetmore Carryl.

Enjoy – and lots of bearhugs to you!

Welcome to the fifth leg of our Librivox World Tour, where we are taking a trip through South America with 10 gems from our catalog.

We are coming from the North into South America, just like the cocoa plant. Chocolate: or An Indian Drinke, our recording of the 17th century book by Antonio Colmenero des Ledesma, sings the praise of the drink of the Gods in a lovely poem at the beginning.

The early men living in The Lost World were probably too busy fighting for survival to sit down and drink chocolate. Read the famous novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, involving dinosaurs and vicious apes, set in Venezuela.

From Venezuela to the forest in Guyana flees Abel, and eventually he takes up residence with an Indian tribe. In a wood that is taboo for them, he finds Rima, and they fall in love, in W. H. Hudson’s novel Green Mansions, a Romance of the Tropical Forest.

However, their luck does not last long, and just like in the story of Adam and Eve, the fall comes oh too quickly. A Drama of Exile by Elizabeth Barrett Browning retells the well known biblical story.

Brazilian Tales contains six lovely short stories by various authors, representative of Brazilian literature at the end of the 19th century.

Brazil was also the endpoint of the 1867 expedition through The Andes and the Amazon. James Orton tells about the journey, starting in Ecuador, going through the mountains and the forest, and producing one of the first maps of equatorial America.

A scientific sensation was the rediscovery of Machu Picchu in summer 1911 by Hiram Bingham. Inca Lands gives a detailed description of the expedition into the Highlands of Peru, as well as of the excavation of the ancient city in 1912.

An interesting discovery is made by Capt. Delano off the shores of Chile, where he finds a Spanish slave ship in distress. Offering help to its captain Benito Cereno, he is to find out that not everything is as it seems on the surface in Herman Melville’s novel…

Thankfully, slavery is Far Away and Long Ago, just like the childhood of W. H. Hudson, who was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 19th century, and recounts his memories of the times in this autobiographical book.

A Victorian gentleman stumbles upon a tropical world on Antarctica. He finds there a highly developed society, but can he cope with a complete reversal of his values, where being poor is good? Have fun with James de Mille’s interesting utopian novel A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder.

Enjoy – and send a postcard!

Welcome to the fourth leg of our LibriVox World Tour! Enjoy our trip through the New World with 10 gems from our catalog.

Perfectly suited to us cheechako’s – newcomers – in these lands are the Selections from Ballads of a Cheechako by Robert W. Service, one of the best known Canadian poets.

Newcomers also are those Hindus who fight for their rights at a college in the Midwest of the USA. As the granddaughter of the college founder goes over to their side, the trouble gets even worse… Enjoy our production of Susan Glaspell’s drama Inheritors.

In 1519, Hernando Cortes and his conquistadores came to America in search of fame and riches. The History of the Conquest of Mexico by William H. Prescott describes how they destroyed the empire of the Aztecs.

300 years later, in 1838, the remains of another empire – the Mayan – were discovered by John Lloyd Stevens and F. Catherwood. The former wrote down their adventures in Belize, Guatemala and Honduras in Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, Vol. I.

It is clear that such a discovery in Honduras attracts many adventurers. Victor Appleton portrays the search for a Mayan idol made of pure gold in the juvenile fiction Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders.

Similarly miraculous is the island of Bermuda, certainly when seen through the eyes of Mark Twain. Picture his trip to this beautiful island with the white houses with Some Rambling Notes on an Idle Excursion.

Staying on an island is usually rather pleasant – unless you happen to be A Prisoner of Morro, like US Naval cadet Clif Faraday. Read about his adventures in the novel by Upton Sinclair, set in Cuba during the Spanish American War of 1898.

About 80 years earlier, the Caribbean was the hunting spot for pirates. Aaron Smith, on the way from Jamaica to England, was captured and enslaved by Cuban pirates, finally managed to escape – but only to be put on trial for piracy in England. The Atrocities of the Pirates is his story.

A far more romantic depiction of pirate life – as the final choice of a wrongly convicted man – is Captain Blood. Set in Barbados, the adventure novel by Rafael Sabatini was the basis for the film of the same name which made Errol Flynn famous.

Stanton H. King, born in Barbados, could only resist the siren call of the sea until his 12th birthday. Then he followed the footsteps of his older brothers and became a sailor, and endured Dog Watches at Sea for just as many years, before settling down on dry land again.

Enjoy – and send a postcard!