Just over half a century ago, Harry Schwartz, a city planner, and his wife, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, an editor at The Writer magazine, were sitting in their Boston apartment with friends and talking about American fiction.

J. D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” had just come out. John Updike and Philip Roth were getting underway with their first books. Writers like Norman Mailer, William Styron and James Baldwin were hitting their stride.

A question arose: What did these people actually sound like? No one knew.

Public readings were not nearly as common in 1961 as they are today, and the two main spoken-word record companies, Caedmon and Spoken Arts, concentrated on heavy hitters like T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and W. H. Auden. Lesser known and younger writers, by and large, were silent presences.

The Schwartzes sensed an opportunity. Why not invite a few favorites to record excerpts from their work, and then sell the performances in bookstores and record stores. So began the brief life of Calliope Records, a series of seven-inch 331/3-r.p.m. discs, released in 1963 for $1.95 each, offering 15-minute readings by Updike, Styron, Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, James Jones and Peter Ustinov. The series is now being reissued, under the title “Calliope Author Readings,” on two CDs and downloadable audio files.