Marianne Mantell, who helped pave the way for audiobooks, dies at the age of 93

Marianne Mantell, who in her early 20s helped start the audiobook revolution by co-founding a record company that turned recordings of countless literary giants, including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Dylan Thomas, into mass-market entertainment, died Jan. 22 at her home in Princeton, New Jersey. She was 93.

The cause was complications of a recent fall, her son Michael Mantell said.

Mantell (then Marianne Roney) was a struggling 22-year-old freelance writer in 1952 when she and Barbara Holdridge (then Barbara Cohen), a former classmate at Hunter College in New York City, founded Caedmon Records, a pioneering spoken-word label specializing in great literature.

Success came quickly. Caedmon’s first release, an album by Dylan Thomas whose centerpiece was his short story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” came out that same year and went on to sell more than 400,000 copies during the 1950s and to become a holiday perennial.

In a sense, Caedmon brought the idea of oral interpretation of poetry, short stories and novels from the Beatnik dens of Greenwich Village into middle-class living rooms. The company recorded or reissued popularly accessible albums featuring giants of 20th-century literature, including T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Gertrude Stein, all interpreting their own works.

The label also released recordings of plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov and other masters read by luminaries like Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave and Ruby Dee, as well as recordings of Albert Camus and Pablo Neruda reading in their native languages and J.R.R. Tolkien slipping into fluent Elvish for “The Lord of the Rings.”

“Caedmon was the first major label to specialize exclusively in spoken-word recordings of literature,” Matthew Rubery, a professor of modern literature at Queen Mary University of London and the author of the 2016 book “The Untold Story of the Talking Book,” wrote in an email. “And, at a time when many worried about television’s influence, it succeeded in making ‘highbrow’ literature accessible to a mass audience.”

In an era when American business was dominated by Fortune 500 companies, it was rare enough for two recent college graduates to create what was in essence a tech startup aimed at disrupting two industries, book publishing and the record business. And in an era when those corporate giants were run largely by men in Brooks Brothers suits, it was even more unusual for two women to do so.

“Caedmon was the era’s only female-owned record company, and its remarkable success stood out in a male-dominated record industry,” Rubery said. “At the time, only around 5% of record industry employees were women, and those women were almost all in marketing and retail roles. The rise to the top by two female entrepreneurs represented a remarkable exception.”

As Mantell wrote in a 2004 remembrance for AudioFile magazine, “Although poets had been recorded before as vanity efforts, it was Barbara and I who realized that there was an audience of literate people and made a business out of it.”

Marianne Roney was born in Berlin on Nov. 23, 1929, the only child of Max Roney, an Austrian mechanical engineer, and Serena (Berger) Roney, a Hungarian-born bookkeeper who later became an importer of housewares. The Roneys, a Jewish family, spent much of the late 1930s fleeing Nazi Germany.