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A Streak of Business. Nowadays, Marianne (married to a Manhattan public-relations consultant, Harold Mantel!) and Barbara (married to a Baltimore hydraulic engineer, Lawrence Holdridge) visit their cluttered Manhattan office only a couple of times a week to supervise some 100 pending releases. For their Shakespeare project, Partner Mantell went to London last summer to round up talent, much of it from the Old Vic and other repertory companies. Their curtain raiser is a moving and brilliant Macbeth, starring Anthony Quayle and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies. The two-hour, two-record production was followed by Othello, with Cyril Cusack and Frank Silvera; and The Taming of the Shrew, with Margaret Leighton and Trevor Howard. Early next month: Sir John Gielgud's The Winter's Tale.
Orders for the new series, through a record-of-the-month sort of operation known as Shakespeare Recording Society Inc. (4,000 members so far), are "twelve times what we expected," notes Partner Mantell. She once said: "After studying Greek, Gothic and Sanskrit, we were obviously unfitted for anything." Now she admits: "We apparently had a streak of business sense."
Caedmon releases, Businesswoman Mantell estimates, have reached an audience of 2,000,000—many of them "people who haven't picked up a book of poetry since they left school. If a person is not a serious student, there is something about the printed page which separates him from poetry; recorded works bridge the gap. This is pretty reassuring at a time when so many are flagellating themselves with the failure of American culture."
* According to the English chronicler Bede (circa A.D. 672-735), Caedmon was an illiterate herdsman who became the first English Christian poet, after receiving a divine call in a dream.