Barbara Holdridge, who co-founded Caedmon Records, "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 June 9, the New York Times reported. She was 95. Thomas's recording was released in 1952, and went on to sell more than 400,000 copies during the 1950s.
Holdridge and Marianne Mantell built Caedmon Records with LPs featuring authors and poets like W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway reading their own works. By 1966, sales had reached $14 million (about $141 million now) and Caedmon began recording plays and other works of literature performed by actors such as Vanessa Redgrave, John Gielgud, Maggie Smith, Richard Burton, and Basil Rathbone. The label also produced children's stories like Babar and Winnie the Pooh, featuring the voices of Boris Karloff, Carol Channing, and others.
"They were enormously prescient," Matthew Barton, the recorded sound curator for the Library of Congress, said in an interview last year. "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."
The story of Caedmon, which "earned dozens of Grammy nominations and became the gold standard for spoken-word recordings," is all the more striking because Holdridge and Mantell were 22-year-old recent graduates of Hunter College in Manhattan when they founded the company. "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," the Times noted.
In 2001, Holdridge was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, which honored her for creating a broad audience for "diverse, high-quality literature" and demonstrating the significance of spoken-word recordings. After selling Caedmon, she created Stemmer House Publishers, which published children's books and sourcebooks for designers and artists. She also taught book publishing and writing at Loyola University Maryland.
Regarding Caedmon, 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."