Mantell paved the way for audiobooks
Marianne Mantell, who in her early 20s helped start the audiobook revolution by cofounding 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, N. J. She was 93.
The cause was complications of a recent fall, son Michael 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.
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 such as 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.
“Caedmon was the era’s only female- owned record company, and its remarkable success stood out in a male- dominated record industry,” Rubery said.
After college, Mantell made ends meet as a freelancer, writing liner notes and translating opera librettos for classical records. Frustrated by her entry- level writer’s pay, she suggested to a few classical labels that they try recording medieval poetry or the works of Shakespeare.
The labels had no interest, so Mantell and Holdridge scraped together $ 1,800 to start a label.
As neophyte record executives, the pair needed to make a splash, so they set their sights on Thomas, the Welsh poet who was on tour in the United States.
Thomas was skeptical of the venture, but he was swayed by their proposal:
a $ 500 initial fee, plus $ 10 in royalties for sales above 1,000 albums, to record a 45- minute LP.
Thomas trained his woody yet mellifluous voice on five of his poems, including his famous “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” for the album’s Aside.
They still needed to fill the B- side, however, so Thomas suggested prose — his short story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”
“Only when he began to record ‘ A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ did we know that we were participating in an event historic in English literature: the discovery of a genre,” she continued. “Literature that, like music, must be performed to achieve its real effect.”
Caedmon rolled along through the 1950s and ’ 60s, and along the way attracted not only luminaries as recording artists but future luminaries as workplace colleagues. Mike Nichols, before he became a celebrated director, worked as a shipping clerk. Andy Warhol, then unknown, created the cover art for an album by Tennessee Williams.
In the early 1970s, the partners sold Caedmon to the publishing company D. C. Heath ( it is now an imprint of Harperaudio).