Marianne Mantell, 1929-2023

choi

James R Hagerty, Entrepreneur Recorded Voices of Great Poets. Wall Street Journal, Feb 18, 2023, at page A10 (in the Obituary half page).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mar ... -in-poetry-d7d31616

Note:
(a) audiobook
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiobook
(section 2 History: There had been recordings for the blind, but "Caedmon Records was a pioneer in the audiobook business. It was the first company dedicated to selling spoken work recordings to the public and has been called the 'seed' of the audiobook industry")
(b) poets:
(i) WH Auden
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._Auden
(1907 – 1973; born in England, naturalized as American in 1946)
(ii)
(A) Caedmon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A6dmon
("(fl. c. 657 – 684) * * * Cædmon's only known surviving work is Cædmon's Hymn, a nine-line alliterative vernacular praise poem in honour of God. The poem is one of the earliest attested examples of Old English" text and poem)
(B) floruit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floruit
("Latin: flōruit [meaning (he, she or it) flourished] is the third-person singular perfect active indicative of the Latin verb * * * flōrēre 'to bloom, flower, or flourish,' from the noun [masculine] flōs, flōris, 'flower' ")
(iii) Dylan Thomas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_Thomas
(1914-1953; Welsh)
—------------------------------
Marianne Roney struggled to make a living in the early 1950s by writing liner notes for record albums and translating opera libretti. Men who ran record companies often asked her for ideas about what they should record -- but rejected all of her suggestions. One day, in exasperation, she blurted: Why not poetry?

Then she decided it was an excellent idea.

With one of her former Hunter College classmates, Barbara Cohen, she founded Caedmon Records in 1952 to record poetry and other spoken works. Their first recording -- of Dylan Thomas reading poems and one of his stories, “A Child's Christmas in Wales"- proved a hit.

At first, the women, both in their early 20s, worked in a cramped office and used a wheelbarrow to deliver some of their albums. The business thrived, however, and helped lay the foundations for today's audiobook business. W.H. Auden, Robert Frost and Sylvia Plath were among the many authors who read their works for Caedmon.

Writing later under her married name, Marianne Mantell, she recalled, "Our purpose was literary: to capture on tape as nearly as possible what the poet heard in his own head as he wrote. We were trying to take contemporary po- etry away from the literary critics and give it back to its audience."
Ms. Mantell died Jan. 22 of complications from a recent fall. She was 93.

Caedmon, named after an early English poet, is now part of HarperCollins Publishers, a unit of News Corp, which also owns The Wall Street Journal.

Poets "had to be coaxed, cajoled, begged to record," Ms. Mantell wrote in a 2004 article for AudioFile magazine, "and being women, we weren't burdened by the macho sense that this might be demeaning."

Dylan Thomas, given to late-night carousing, was hard to pin down. The Caedmon founders learned he was staying at the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan and met him there. He agreed to record an album for a $500 advance and 10% royalty, according to "The Untold Story of the Talking Book," a 2016 history by Matthew Rubery.

They found Ezra Pound at a psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. On one of their recording visits, they presented him with an Italian sausage, recalled Barbara Holdridge, as Ms. Cohen was known after her marriage. "He flew into one of his rages, I have no idea why, and hurled this heavy salami at me. Which I dodged," Ms. Holdridge told the Baltimore Sun.

Not all of Caedmon's poets were living. The company recorded the plays of Shakespeare and John Gielgud [an English actor] reading Shakespearean sonnets. Caedmon also created re- cordings of literary prose and chil- dren's stories.

For help moving boxes of records from a recording plant to their office, they relied on the kindness of strangers. "We once figured out there were 40,000 men on the streets of New York who helped us lift our wheelbarrow full of records up and down curbs, over the years,” Ms. Mantell told the Record newspaper. "It was so heavy, we couldn't have done it ourselves."

Marianne Roney was born Nov. 23, 1929, in Berlin. Her Jewish family fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and had stops in Paris and London before settling in New York in mechanical 1941. Her father was engineer. Her mother was a book- keeper and in the late 1950s set up a business importing housewares from Asia.

A piano, violin and accordion player, Marianne Roney graduated from the High School of Music & Art in New York before enrolling at Hunter College.

Caedmon thrived in the 1960s as libraries and schools bought large numbers of educational recordings. By 1970, annual sales were about $2 million, the Associated Press reported. That year, the founders sold the company to D.C. Heath & Co., a textbook publisher. Harper & Row, a predecessor of HarperCollins, bought Caedmon in 1987.

Ms. Mantell and her husband, Harold Mantell, later ran a distributor of documentaries, including ones he produced. He died in 2006.

She is survived by two of her four children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Ms. Mantell sometimes quipped that, as a humanities major, she was "unfit for anything." Yet her college studies in literature and Greek proved useful in an unplanned business career. "We had some naive faith that there were enough people with our tastes,” Ms. Mantell told the Women's News Service in 1967.