Marianne Mantell, who helped launch the audiobook revolution in her 20s by co-founding a record company that turned the recordings of countless literary giants including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Dylan Thomas into mass-market entertainment, died on January 22 at her home in Princeton, NJ She was 93 years old.
Complications from a recent fall were responsible, her son Michael Mantell said.
Ms. Mantell (then Marianne Roney) was a struggling 22-year-old freelance author in 1952 when she co-founded Caedmon Records with Barbara Holdridge (then Barbara Cohen), a former classmate at Hunter College in New York City, a pioneering word label company specializing in in great literature.
Success got here quickly. Caedmon’s first release, an album by Dylan Thomas centered on his short story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”, got here out the identical 12 months and sold over 400,000 copies within the Fifties and have become an integral a part of the vacation.
In a way, Caedmon took the thought of oral interpretation of poetry, stories, and novels from the Beatnik dens of Greenwich Village to the drawing rooms of the center class. The company has recorded or reissued widely available albums featuring the giants of twentieth century literature, including TS Eliot, Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Gertrude Stein, each interpreting their very own works.
The label has also released recordings of plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov and other masters read by the likes of Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave and Ruby Dee, in addition to recordings of Albert Camus and Pablo Neruda reading of their native languages and JRR Tolkien moving into fluent Elvish for Lord of the Rings.
“Caedmon was the primary major label to specialize solely in spoken fiction recordings,” says Matthew Rubery, Professor of Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary University London and writer of The Untold Story of the Talking Book, published in 2016. wrote in an email. “And at a time when many were anxious about television’s influence, it succeeded in making massive ‘high-end’ literature available.”
In an era when American business was dominated by Fortune 500 firms, two recent college graduates rarely formed what was essentially a tech startup aimed toward disrupting two industries, book publishing and the record industry. And at a time when these corporate giants were run mostly by men in Brooks Brothers suits, it was much more remarkable that two women were doing it.
“Caedmon was the one female-owned record label on the time, and its remarkable success stood out in a male-dominated music industry,” said Rubery. “At the time, only about 5 percent of the music industry workforce were women, and just about all of those women were in marketing and retail positions. The rise to the highest of two female entrepreneurs was a remarkable exception.”
As Mrs. Mantell wrote in a 2004 memoir for AudioFile magazine, “Although poets had previously been recorded as vanity, Barbara and I spotted there was an audience of literate people and we made a business out of it.”
Marianne Roney was born in Berlin on November 23, 1929, the one child of Max Roney, an Austrian mechanical engineer, and Serena (Berger) Roney, a Hungarian accountant who later became a household goods importer. The Roneys, a Jewish family, spent much of the late Nineteen Thirties fleeing Nazi Germany.
After a brief stay in London, they managed to emigrate to New York in 1941, where Mrs. Mantell, a violin player and an ardent lover of classical literature, graduated from the High School of Music & Art (now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) before attending Hunter where she graduated from Phi Beta Kappa with a level in Greek.
After college, she made ends meet as a freelancer, writing notes and translating opera librettos for classical records. Frustrated together with her budding author’s pay, she sought to broaden her skilled horizons and suggested to several classical music firms that they fight recording medieval poetry or the works of Shakespeare.
The labels weren’t interested, so Mrs. Mantell and Mrs. Holdridge pooled $1,800 together to begin their very own label, which they named Caedmon after a seventh-century shepherd who believed the primary recognized English poet. Company password: “The third dimension of the printed page.”
As budding record executives, the pair needed to make a splash, in order that they focused on Thomas, a Welsh poet who had achieved international celebrity status and was touring the US. Failing to realize an audience with him after reading at 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, they began attempting to call him from his room on the Chelsea Hotel.
Thomas, a famous drunk and late-night reveler, was hard to trace down. According to the 2004 book Dylan Thomas: A New Life by Andrew Lycett, Mrs. Holdridge finally managed to catch him one morning at 5am after he stumbled home from a celebration and arranged to fulfill at Little Shrimp restaurant within the hotel.
Thomas was skeptical in regards to the enterprise, but was persuaded by their proposal: a $500 upfront fee plus $10 royalties for sales over 1,000 albums to record a 45-minute album.
When Thomas arrived within the studio, he practiced his woody yet melodious voice on five of his poems, including his famous “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” on the album’s A-side.
However, they still had to finish the B-side, so Thomas suggested prose – specifically the short story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”, a nostalgic meditation on his Christmas experience as a boy, presented with a mournful sense of lost youth that had recently appeared in Harper’s Bazaar magazine. “What we heard was thunder,” Mrs. Mantell later wrote.
“It wasn’t until he began recording ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ that we knew we were a part of a historic event in English literature: the invention of a genre,” she continued. “Literature which, like music, have to be performed to attain its real effect.”
Caedmon scrolled through the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, and along the way in which attracted not only luminaries as recording artists, but unwittingly future luminaries as workmates. Mike Nichols worked as a shipping clerk before becoming a widely known Broadway and Hollywood director. Andy Warhol, then unknown, created the quilt for Tennessee Williams’ album.
However, within the early Nineteen Seventies, Mrs. Mantell was able to move on. The partners sold Caedmon to the publishing company DC Heath (now HarperAudio), and Mrs. Mantell and her husband, Harold Mantell, a public relations director and later a documentary filmmaker, arrange a documentary film distribution company.
In addition to her son Michael, Mrs. Mantell is survived by a daughter, Eva; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Her husband, whom she married in 1956. died in 2006. Two other sons died before her, Stephen in 2009 and David in 2011.
In her AudioFile article, which recounted a visit to Robert Frost’s home to record it in 1956, Mrs. Mantell summarized her view of the corporate’s legacy.
“We didn’t just need to keep the celebrity voices (as much because the poet is a star),” she wrote. “Our goal was literary: to capture on tape as closely as possible what the poet heard in his head while writing.”
