Lloyd Conant was born and raised in St. Joseph, Missouri. When his father, a candy maker, lost his job during the Great Depression, Conant decided to move to Kansas City and sell typewriters to contribute to the family income. It was a perceptive choice, considering the impact he would go on to have on the printing and publishing industry.

Conant’s partnership with motivational speaker and audiobook author Earl Nightingale led to the formation of the company Nightingale-Conant, a self-improvement publisher that became one of the earliest pioneers in audiobooks and recorded technology.

Newlywed with a baby on the way, Lloyd Conant, like so many of his generation, found the course of his life altered by the outbreak of World War II. After piloting slip planes in the European Theater, Conant returned to the country of his birth more determined than ever that anything was possible for an American with hard work and ethics.

Landing in Chicago, Conant used what he had learned before the war, selling typewriters and networking in Kansas City business circles, to start his first publishing and printing businesses. It was slow going, and his young family had its share of struggles. Conant continued to network and consume as much knowledge as he could, looking for the ideas that would give him an edge.

That’s how, in the 1950s, Conant encountered what was, in those days, an uncommon thing — a self-improvement recorded audiobook. The title was The Strangest Secret. The author/speaker was successful radio broadcaster, insurance entrepreneur, and Napoleon Hill devotee Earl Nightingale.

Conant wound up meeting Nightingale and collaborating with him on several projects. They found they had similar interests and great synergy — Nightingale, the creative force, and Conant, the “business side.” In 1960, they formed Nightingale-Conant, a first-of-its-kind company dedicated to publishing and distributing self-improvement audio programs.

Despite having basically no competitors, the idea was so new that Nightingale-Conant took awhile to take off, but numerous publications, including Nightingale's audio program Lead The Field, went on to sell over 1 million copies. Nightingale-Conant also produced Nightingale's radio program, Our Changing World, which became the longest-running, most widely-syndicated radio show of all time, playing on over 1,000 stations at its peak.

At the time of Conant’s passing in 1986, Nightingale-Conant was a dominant force in the booming self-improvement audio publishing industry — which it remains to this day.

The Strangest Secret (1957)