Sounding books
The Sounding Books was an audio book series published on Caston records by the ZASTA recording studio in Munich in the mid-1950s . In addition to fairy tale records with text books to practice reading and lecturing, there was also a program for adults with “the most beautiful works of world literature”, read by speakers such as Oskar Werner , Fritz Strassner or Kurt Horwitz , the stories by Joseph Roth , B. Traven , Edgar Allan Poe , Nikolai Leskow , Rainer Maria Rilke and Lew Tolstoy performed on 17 cm long-playing records. With Erich Kästner's lecture of his Eulenspiegel retelling , an author reading was also available as a sounding book.
The sounding books published in part in made of plastic record albums containing up to four LPs with a playing time of 20 minutes.
The recordings of the children's program with the speakers Albert Florath , Lina Carstens and Fritz Rasp later saw numerous re-releases on various labels (Telefunken Music for Everyone, Falcon Fairy Tale Series) while the adult program only exists in the original first edition and is therefore a rarity.
As far as the record bags are concerned, the series was uniformly designed by the graphic artist Erich Hofmann .