Barbara Holdridge, who co-founded the first commercially successful spoken-word record label, one that began with the poet Dylan Thomas reciting his story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and that led to today’s multibillion-dollar audiobook industry, died on Monday at home in Baltimore, Md. She was 95.
Her daughter, Eleanor Holdridge, confirmed the death.
Ms. Holdridge, along with her best friend, Marianne Mantell, built the label, Caedmon Records, into a recording industry dynamo by releasing LPs of such notable authors and poets as W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway reading their own words.
As the recordings’ popularity grew — sales reached $14 million by 1966 (about $141 million in today’s currency) — Caedmon began recording plays and other works of literature performed by famous actors, including Vanessa Redgrave, John Gielgud, Maggie Smith, Richard Burton and Basil Rathbone. The label also produced children’s stories like “Babar” and “Winnie the Pooh,” employing Boris Karloff, Carol Channing and other performers to read them.
But it was the Dylan Thomas album, featuring the poet’s resonant delivery, that put the infant company on the road to success. Thomas, an eccentric, hard-drinking Welsh poet, was at the height of his fame when the record was released in 1952, and it went on to sell more than 400,000 copies in the 1950s, an unheard amount for such literary fare. Just over a year later, he died of pneumonia at 39.
“If we had started with some of the wonderful poets we recorded later, such as Katherine Anne Porter, Archibald MacLeish, Ezra Pound and Faulkner, I don’t think anybody would have cared that much,” Ms. Holdridge said in 2014 in an interview with WNYC radio in New York. “Students would have. Literature professors would have. But the spark was the Dylan Thomas recordings, and with the money that came from the sales of those recordings, we were able to go forward and record the authors whom we admired.”
The label aimed to present literature as it originated — in the spoken word, Ms. Holdridge explained. She and Ms. Mantell named the company Caedmon in honor of the seventh-century cowherd considered the earliest known English poet.
Though there had been attempts at spoken-word recordings before Caedmon, the two women, who had scraped together $1,500 to start the venture, foresaw a broad audience for authors reading their own words.
“They were enormously prescient,” Matthew Barton, the recorded sound curator for the Library of Congress, said in an interview last year for this obituary. “If you walked into a record store in 1952 and heard Dylan Thomas reading ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales,’ you would say, ‘I want that,’ and your wallet comes out. It showed how well they understood the potential of the medium in this way.”
The Library of Congress added the album to its National Recording Registry in 2008, noting that “it has been credited with launching the audiobook industry in the United States.” By 2023, the audiobook market had achieved almost $7 billion in global sales, reaching an estimated 140 million listeners.
Under Ms. Holdridge and Ms. Mantell, Caedmon earned dozens of Grammy nominations and became the gold standard for spoken-word recordings.
The Caedmon story is made more remarkable by the fact that Ms. Holdridge and Ms. Mantell — Barbara Cohen and Marianne Roney at the time — were 22-year-old recent graduates of Hunter College in Manhattan when they began their label. Both had degrees in the humanities, and neither had any business experience. In an era when women were expected to be housewives or schoolteachers, Ms. Holdridge, who worked as an assistant editor at a New York publisher, and Ms. Mantell, who wrote label copy for a record company, were ambitious, determined and bored.
Over lunch one day, they lamented that they were working for bosses “who were much more stupid than we,” Ms. Holdridge recalled in the WNYC interview. She suggested that they go to a reading that Thomas was giving that night at the 92nd Street Y. Ms. Mantell then made a further suggestion: “Let’s record him.” They had already been discussing the idea of recording authors reading their own works.
After the reading, they sent a note to Thomas asking if he would consider participating in a recording project with them. They signed the note “B. Cohen and M. Roney,” so that he wouldn’t know that they were women. His manager intercepted the note and sent them a reply, suggesting that they call Thomas at the Chelsea Hotel, where he was living at the time.
After several unsuccessful attempts to reach him, Ms. Holdridge tried calling at 5 o’clock one morning, on the chance that he might just be stumbling home after a night of hard drinking. He picked up the phone. Yes, he said, he would meet the women to discuss their idea.
To their surprise, he actually showed up at the appointed hour, bringing along his wife, the writer Caitlin Thomas. Over a boisterous lunch, he agreed to do the recording for a $500 advance, plus royalties.
“He even wrote down a number of poems he wanted to record,” Ms. Holdridge recalled. “Getting him to the recording studio, though, was something else.”
After one no-show, Thomas eventually arrived at Steinway Hall, a studio on West 57th Street, and recorded a series of poems, including his masterpiece “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” When they still didn’t have enough material to fill both sides of a 33⅓ LP, the women asked if he had anything else to record, and he remembered a story he had published in Harper’s Bazaar called “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” a nostalgic reminiscence from a young boy’s viewpoint. He recorded it as the B-side of the album, and it was that tale that catapulted the record to best-sellerdom.
The women began contacting other famous writers, both male and female, asking them to come to the studio to record their words. And many did.
Barbara Ann Cohen was born in New York City on July 26, 1929, to Herbert Lawrence Cohen, a textile sales representative, and Bertha (Gold) Cohen, who oversaw the household.
Barbara was an avid reader as a child and studied Greek. She also developed a lifelong love of gardening, starting out by making little gardens of twigs and acorns on her apartment windowsill.
She married Lawrence Holdridge, a hydraulic engineer, in 1959. He died in 1998. In addition to her daughter Eleanor, she is survived by another daughter, Diana Holdridge, and two grandchildren. Ms. Mantell died in 2023 at 93.
Ms. Holdridge and Ms. Mantell sold Caedmon to Raytheon in 1970, and it was later acquired by Harper Collins, where the Caedmon imprint of HarperAudio still exists.
In 2001, Ms. Holdridge was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, which lauded her for creating a broad audience for “diverse, high-quality literature” and demonstrating the significance of spoken-word recordings. “The Caedmon catalog is extraordinary for the dramatic gender equality and cultural inclusiveness it achieved,” the Hall of Fame website states. “It expanded the audience for American women’s writing, and women’s writing in general.”
After selling Caedmon, Ms. Holdridge and her husband bought the 18th-century Stemmer House in Owings Mills, Md., and she created Stemmer House Publishers, which put out children’s books and sourcebooks for designers and artists. There, she leaned into another of her passions, developing a 40-acre garden on the property. She also taught book publishing and writing at Loyola University Maryland.
Explaining her aspirations for Caedmon, Ms. Holdridge told NPR in 2002: “We did not want to do a collection of great voices or important literary voices. We wanted them to read as though they were recreating the moment of inspiration. They did exactly that. They read with a feeling, an inspiration that came through.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
