Marianne Mantell was an American writer, editor, and producer who helped launch the audiobook industry when she co-founded Caedmon Records, widely considered to be the first major label to focus on spoken-word literature.
- Died: January 22, 2023 (Who else died on January 22?)
- Details of death: Died at 93 in her home in Princeton, N.J. of complications from a fall.
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Early life
Born 1929 in Berlin, Marianne Roney Mantell spent her youth fleeing Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The family settled in New York in 1941, where she developed her passion for classic literature and music – first at New York’s famed High School of Music & Art and then at Hunter College.
Frustrated by the low pay she earned as a freelance liner-note writer for record companies, and intrigued by the untapped potential of spoken-word recordings, the literary-minded Mantell tried – and failed – to persuade any classical music labels to expand their catalogs with recordings of poetry and Shakespearean works. Convinced of the untapped market potential, Mantell partnered in 1951 with college classmate Barbara Cohen Holdridge to launch Caedmon Records. It was the only female-owned major label of the era and the first to focus on spoken-word recordings of literary works.
The first audiobook
Mantell and Holdridge decided they needed some star power to offset the challenges of launching a new, disrupting media in a male-dominated field. Tracking down the wildly popular Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in New York City, they persuaded him to sign a recording contract. The result – A Child’s Christmas in Wales and Five Poems – heralded a new industry. Widely cited as the first audiobook, the instant classic sold 400,000 copies by 1960 and was selected for the National Recording Registry in 2008. Other notable works soon followed, with readings of John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, and Broadways plays like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Success after success followed, until Mantell sold the company in the early 1970s. She stayed focused on the cultural arts until her death, working with her husband at Films for the Humanities and Sciences (later known as Films Media Group).
Notable quote
“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. Literature that, like music, must be performed to achieve its real effect.” – quoted in The New York Times
Tributes to Marianne Mantell
Full obituary: The Washington Post
