Marianne Mantell, who helped launch the audiobook industry as a co-founder of Caedmon Records, one of the only record companies of its time owned by women, died January 22. She was 93. The Washington Post reported that after she graduated from Hunter College, where she had studied ancient Greek and immersed herself in poetry, Mantell worked as a freelancer for record companies, writing liner notes and translating opera libretti. In 1951 "she tried to persuade her boss of the untapped audience for spoken-word recordings, full-length poetry albums intended for literate listeners as well as lapsed readers. He mocked the idea, then dismissed it."
The following year Mantell met with her college classmate Barbara Holdridge, who was also disenchanted by her job at a publishing house, and their discussion of poet Dylan Thomas's recent piece, "In the White Giant's Thigh," sparked the idea of recording him.
"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," the Post wrote.
Mantell and Holdridge persuaded Thomas to sign a record deal and brought him to Steinway Hall, where he recorded several of his best-known pieces. To fill the B side of the record, they also recorded a largely forgotten Christmas story he had published in Harper's Bazaar. 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," the Post noted.
Caedmon Records, which now operates as the HarperCollins imprint Caedmon Audio, subsequently 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.
"Caedmon proved that spoken-word recordings could be both culturally significant and commercially viable," said Matthew Rubery, who chronicled the company's history as part of his 2016 book The Untold Story of the Talking Book. 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."
By 1966, Caedmon had $14 million in annual sales and occupied an entire floor in a Manhattan office building. The company's releases included readings of Broadway plays, texts by African American writers such as Langston Hughes, and a set of Shakespeare's collected works. The staff included recording engineer Peter Bartók, a son of composer Béla Bartók, and a young Mike Nichols. A promising artist named Andy Warhol provided the cover art for a Tennessee Williams record, while playwright and screenwriter Howard Sackler served as the company's dramatic director.
In the early 1970s, Mantell and Holdridge sold their company to the Raytheon-owned publishing firm D.C. Heath. Holdridge started a small press, and Mantell joined her husband in running Films for the Humanities and Sciences, later known as the Films Media Group, a distributor of educational documentaries.