Marianne Mantell who in her early 20s helped start the audiobook revolution by co-founding, with Barbara Holdridge, Caedmon Records, a spoken-word company that turned recordings of literary giants, including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Dylan Thomas, into mass-market entertainment, died on Jan. 22 at her home in Princeton, NJ. She was 93.

Success came quickly. Caedmon’s first release, an album by Dylan Thomas whose centerpiece was his short story, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” sold more than 400,000 copies during the 1950s and went on to become a holiday perennial. Other recordings featured T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Gertrude Stein, all interpreting their own works.

“We were not just out to preserve celebrity voices (to the extent that a poet is a celebrity),” she wrote for AudioFile. “Our purpose was literary: To capture on tape as nearly as possible what the poet heard in his head as he wrote.”