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Books|Barbara Holdridge, Whose Record Label Foretold Audiobooks, Dies at 95
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/books/barbara-holdridge-dead.html
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Beginning with a reading by Dylan Thomas, she and a friend found unlikely commercial success in the 1950s with recordings of famous writers reciting their work.
June 10, 2025Updated 3:03 p.m. ET
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.
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“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.”
