Word: tapes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Kentucky undertaker listens to them in his hearse. Pilots at Mather Air Force Base at Sacramento tune in while on alert status. Today, thousands of American commuters, determined to put the down time of driving to better use, are discovering the pleasures of loud literature: books transcribed on cassette tapes. A widening range of fiction, poetry, history, biography, language courses and self-help texts is now available for the expressway bibliophile with a tape deck. In enlightened circles (and cloverleafs), the numbing AM-FM parade of screaming newsbreaks, "easy listening" and top-ten programming is being replaced with Chaucer...
That prescription is surprisingly new. Back in 1975 few full-length recordings of books were available. Then, as now, only the blind and handicapped could borrow from the Library of Congress's several thousand titles on tape. But that year, Duvall Hecht, 51, an Orange County, Calif., commuter, helped found Books on Tape to counteract the cerebral atrophy he felt during his daily two hours at the wheel. Beginning with George Plimpton's Paper Lion on ten one-hour cassettes, Hecht's mail-order firm grew to represent 500 titles and adds 100 new works each year...
Caedmon, the largest spoken-word recording producer in the nation, tapes on a different track. Famous for its early renditions of literary giants and its 33 Shakespeare plays, the 30-year-old company sold one tape for every ten records in 1971. Now the ratio is 1 to 1 for its nearly 1,000 titles. Caedmon rarely offers complete books, but concentrates on authors reading in their own voices: William Faulkner rushing over the magnificent rhythms of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in a high, fast drawl; Robert Lowell stridently brave in poems about his mental illness; Ernest Hemingway growling...
...zany and offbeat are also well represented on tape. British Comic Terry-Thomas is ideally cast as the reader of two "Jeeves" tales by P.G. Wodehouse (Caedmon; $12.95). Ariel, a new label, offers, among others, Humphrey Bogart as Hotspur in Henry IV on its two-volume Shakespeare in Hollywood set. And for those who cannot break the information habit, Books on Tape offers Newstrack, a bimonthly 90-minute talking magazine-garnered from the pages of TIME and other publications-for $195 per year...
...concealment. Mark Phillips, 33, a London-based correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., smuggled out a videotape containing reports from CBC, CBS, NBC and BBC in the third interior compartment of a zipper bag. At one point, he said, an East German guard was "one zip away" from the tape when Phillips distracted...