Marianne Mantell, who helped launch audiobook industry, dead at age 93

For about two years after she graduated from Hunter College, Marianne Mantell worked as a freelancer for record companies, writing liner notes and translating opera libretti. She had studied ancient Greek and immersed herself in poetry, and in late 1951 she tried to persuade her boss of the untapped audience for spoken-word recordings, fulllength poetry albums intended for literate listeners as well as lapsed readers.

He mocked the idea, then dismissed it.

Mantell was undeterred. She was still thinking about the possibilities of recorded poetry when she sat down for lunch early the next year with her college classmate Barbara Holdridge, a fellow 22-yearold who was similarly disenchanted by her job at a publishing house. The two friends got to talking about the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, whose recent piece “In the White Giant’s Thigh” had scandalized some readers — but not them — with its provocative images of “butter fat goosegirls.”

It turned out that Thomas was speaking that night at New York’s 92nd Street Y. “We should go,” Holdridge suggested.

Mantell went a step further. “We should record him,” she said.

Over the next few weeks, the friends scrounged together about $1,500 to launch Caedmon Records, widely considered the first major label to specialize in spoken-word literary recordings. Its name honored one of the first Old English poets, a 7th-century cowherd who was said to have waked up from a dream with the gift of verse and song.

After hearing Thomas at the Y, Mantell and Holdridge met the poet for drinks at the Chelsea Hotel, persuaded him to sign a record deal (a $500 advance for the first 1,000 sales, then a 10 percent royalty on the rest) and brought him to Steinway Hall, where he recorded several of his bestknown pieces. To fill the B side of the record, they also recorded a largely forgotten Christmas story he had published in Harper’s Bazaar.

“What we heard was like a thunderbolt, transforming with its electricity,” Mantell recalled.

The resulting album, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales and Five Poems,” served as the foundation of their company, selling more than 400,000 copies by 1960 and emerging as a Yuletide favorite with its lilting remembrance of presents, music, snowball fights and log fires. In 2008, it was selected for the National Recording Registry.

In the two decades after its release, Mantell and Holdridge recorded many of the world’s most renowned writers, including W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Lorraine Hansberry, Ezra Pound and Eudora Welty. Their recordings laid the groundwork for what is now a multibillion-dollar industry, with audiobook revenue totaling $1.6 billion in 2021, according to the Audio Publishers Association.

“Caedmon proved that spoken-word recordings could be both culturally significant and commercially viable,” said literary scholar Matthew Rubery, who chronicled the company’s history as part of his 2016 book “The Untold Story of the Talking Book.”

In an email, he added that the label “succeeded in making ‘highbrow’ literature accessible to a mass audience,” with a special appeal for listeners “who yearned for a more immediate and intimate connection with authors.”

Mantell, who died Jan. 22 at 93, spent years trying to deepen that connection. As she saw it, Caedmon’s recordings were an enhancement of the literary experience, not a diminishment. Her mind-set that was summed up by the company’s slogan: “A Third Dimension for the Printed Page.”

“Our purpose was literary: to capture on tape as nearly as possible what the poet heard in his own head as he wrote,” she wrote in a 2004 essay for AudioFile magazine.

“Our purpose was literary: to capture on tape as nearly as possible what the poet heard in his own head as he wrote.”

MARIANNE MANTELL, FROM A 2004 ESSAY FOR AUDIOFILE MAGAZINE