Culture

Barbara Holdridge, Whose Record Label Foretold Audiobooks, Dies at 95

Published

10 months ago

June 10, 2025

Barbara Holdridge, Whose Record Label Foretold Audiobooks, Dies at 95

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.

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Culture

Classic and Contemporary Literature From France, Japan, India, the U.K. and Brazil

Published

6 hours ago

April 18, 2026

Press Room

Literature

FRANCE

According to the writer Leïla Slimani, 44, the author of ‘The Country of Others’ (2020).

Classic

‘Essais de Montaigne’ (‘Essays of Montaigne,’ 1580)

Karl Leitz for Anthony Cotsifas Studio

“France is a country of nuance with a love of conversation and freedom and an aversion to fanaticism. It’s also a country built on reflexive subjectivity. Montaigne reveals all that, writing, ‘I am myself the matter of my book.’”

Contemporary

‘La Carte et le Territoire’ (‘The Map and the Territory,’ 2010) by Michel Houellebecq

“Houellebecq describes France as a museum, where landscape turns into décor and where rural areas are emptying out. He shows the gap between the Parisian elite and the rest of the population, which he paints as aging and disoriented by modernity. It’s a melancholic and yet ironic novel about a disenchanted nation.”

JAPAN

According to the writer Yoko Ogawa, 64, the author of ‘The Memory Police’ (1994).

Classic

‘Man’yoshu’ (late eighth century)

“‘Man’yoshu,’ the oldest extant collection of Japanese poetry, reflects a diversity of voices — from emperors to commoners. They bow their heads to the majesty of nature, weep at the loss of loved ones and find pathos in death. The pages pulse with the vitality of successive generations.”

Contemporary

‘Tenohira no Shosetsu’ (‘Palm-of-the-Hand Stories,’ 1923-72) by Yasunari Kawabata

“The essence of Japanese literature might lie in brevity: waka [a classical 31-syllable poetry form], haiku and short stories. There’s a tradition of cherishing words that seem to well up from the depths of the heart, imbued with warmth. Kawabata, too, exudes more charm in his short stories — especially these very short ‘palm-of-the-hand’ stories — than in his full-length novels. Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, love and hate — everything is contained in these modest worlds.”

INDIA

According to Aatish Taseer, 45, a T contributing writer and the author of ‘Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands’ (2009).

Classic

‘The Kumarasambhava’ (‘The Birth of Kumara,’ circa fifth century) by Kalidasa

Karl Leitz for Anthony Cotsifas Studio

“This is an epic poem by the greatest of the classical Sanskrit poets and dramatists. The gods are in a pickle. They’re being tormented by a monster, but Shiva, their natural protector, is deep in meditation and cannot be disturbed. Kama, the god of love, armed with his flower bow, is sent down from the heavens to waken Shiva. Never a wise idea! The great god, in his fury, opens his third eye and incinerates Kama. But then, paradoxically, the death of the god of love engenders one of the greatest love stories ever told. In the final canto, Shiva and his wife, the goddess Parvati, have the most electrifying sex for days on end — and, 15 centuries on, in our now censorious time, it still leaves one agog at the sensual wonder that was India.”

Contemporary

‘The Complex’ (2026) by Karan Mahajan

“This state-of-the-nation novel, which was published just last month, captures the squalor and malice of Indian family life. Delhi is both my and Mahajan’s hometown and, in this sprawling homage to India’s capital, we see it on the eve of the economic liberalization of the 1990s, as the old socialist city gives way to a megalopolis of ambition, greed and political cynicism.”

THE UNITED KINGDOM

According to the writer Tessa Hadley, 70, the author of ‘The London Train’ (2011).

Classic

‘Jane Eyre’ (1847) by Charlotte Brontë

“Written almost 200 years ago, it remains an insight into our collective soul — or at least its female part. Somewhere at the heart of us there’s a small girl in a wintry room, curled up in the window seat with a book, watching the lashing rain on the window glass: ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. …’ Jane’s solemnity, her outraged sense of justice, her trials to come, the wild weather outside, her longing for something better, for love in her future: All this speaks, perhaps problematically, to something buried in the foundations of our idea of ourselves.”

Contemporary

‘All That Man Is’ (2016) by David Szalay

Karl Leitz for Anthony Cotsifas Studio

“Though he isn’t quite completely British (he’s part Canadian, part Hungarian), Szalay is brilliant at catching certain aspects of British men — aspects that haven’t been written about for a while, now updated for a new era. Funny, exquisitely observed and terrifying, this novel reminds us, too, how absolutely our fate and our identity as a nation belong with the rest of Europe.”

BRAZIL

According to the writer and critic Noemi Jaffe, 64, the author of ‘What Are the Blind Men Dreaming?’ (2016).

Classic

‘Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas’ (‘The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas,’ 1881) by Machado de Assis

Karl Leitz for Anthony Cotsifas Studio

“Not only is it experimental in style — very short chapters mixed with long ones; different points of view; narrated by a corpse; metalinguistic — but it also introduces an extremely ironic view of the rising bourgeoisie in Rio de Janeiro at the time, revealing the hypocrisy of slave owners, the falsehood of love affairs and the only true reason for all social relationships: convenience and personal interest. After almost 150 years, it’s still modern, both formally and, unfortunately, also in content.”

Contemporary

‘Onde Pastam os Minotauros’ (‘Where Minotaurs Graze,’ 2023) by Joca Reiners Terron

“The two main characters — Cão and Crente — along with some of their colleagues, plan to escape and set fire to the slaughterhouse where they work under exploitative conditions. The men develop sympathy for the animals they kill, and one of them becomes a sort of philosopher, revealing the sheer nonsense of existence and the injustices of society in the deepest parts of Brazil.”

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

6 Myths That Endure

Published

18 hours ago

April 17, 2026

Press Room

Literature

The Myth of Meeting Oneself

“This is evident in Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ (circa 30-19 B.C.) when Aeneas witnesses his own heroic actions depicted in murals of the Trojan War in Juno’s temple, and again in Miguel de Cervantes’s ‘Don Quixote’ (1605-15) when Quixote enters a printer’s shop and finds a book that has been published with fake details about his quest even as he’s living it,” says Ben Okri, 67, the author of “The Famished Road” (1991) and “Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted” (2025). “In both stories, individuals throw themselves into the world and think they encounter objects, personae, obstacles and antagonists, but what they actually encounter is themselves. In our time, where our actions meet us in the echo chamber of social media, the process is magnified and swifter. Now a deed doesn’t even have to take place for it to enter the realm of reality.”

The Myth of Utopia

“I’ve always had trouble with the idea of utopia, feeling it derives its energy more from what it wishes to dismantle than what it wishes to enact,” says the T writer at large Aatish Taseer, 45, the author of “Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands” (2009). “Ram Rajya, or the mythical rule of the hero Ram in the Hindu epic ‘Ramayana’ (seventh century B.C.-third century A.D.), like all visions of perfection, contains a built-in violence.”

The Myth of Invisibility

“Invisibility bears power and powerlessness at the same time,” says Okri. “In ancient cultures, it was a gift of the gods. Jesus, for example, walks unrecognized among his disciples, and in Greek myths, Scandinavian legends and ancient African tales, heroes are gifted invisibility in the form of cloaks, sandals or spells. Modern works like the two ‘Invisible Man’ novels, by H.G. Wells (1897) and Ralph Ellison (1952), and the ‘Harry Potter’ novels (1997-2007) by J.K. Rowling reach back to those ideas. But today, people talk about visibility as the highest form of social agency, while invisibility can render a whole class, race, caste or gender unseen.”

The Myth of Steadiness vs. Speed

Charles Henry Bennett’s illustration “The Hare and the Tortoise” (1857). Alamy

“‘The Tortoise and the Hare,’ one of Aesop’s fables (sixth century B.C.), doesn’t necessarily strike a younger person as promising — possibly it has a whiff of morality in it,” says Yiyun Li, 53, the author of “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” (2005) and “Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life” (2017). “But the longer I live and work, the more I understand that it’s the tortoiseness in a person that carries one along, not the swiftness of the mind and body of the hare.”

The Myth of Magic

William Etty’s “The Sirens and Ulysses” (1837). Bridgeman Images

“Ancient magical tales like Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ (late eighth to early seventh century B.C.) were allegories of transformation, of secret teachings,” says Okri, “whereas modern forms of magic are narrative devices and tropes of storytelling that continue the child’s wonder of life. I think of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ (1925), Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ (1967) and, again, the ‘Harry Potter’ books. The intuition of magic persists even in these atheistic and science-infested times, where nothing is to be believed if it can’t be subjected to analysis. This is perhaps because the ultimate magic confronts us every day in the mystery of consciousness. That we can see anything is magical; that we experience love is magical; and perhaps the most magical thing of all is the imagination’s unending power to alter the contents and coordinates of reality. It hides tenaciously in the act of reading, which is the most generative act of magic.”

The Myth of the Immortal Soul

“ ‘The soul is birthless and eternal, imperishable and timeless and is not destroyed when the body is destroyed,’ says Krishna in the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ (second century-first century B.C.). This belief in the immortality of the soul — what used to be called Pythagoreanism in ancient Greece — is still the most pervasive myth in India,” says Taseer, “and has more influence over behavior and how one lives one’s life than any other.”

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

Sign Up for the Book Review’s 2026 Challenge

Published

4 days ago

April 14, 2026

Press Room

Hello book lovers!

What better way to close out National Poetry month than by memorizing a poem?

Next week, from April 20-24, the Book Review will unveil our second poetry challenge. Like last year’s, it will bring you five days of games, videos and writing about one wonderful poem.

Make sure you’re among the first to see each new installment by signing up for the Book Review newsletter. After the challenge is over, you will continue to receive the newsletter, which features book recommendations, publishing news and more. You’ll also receive notifications when we publish our weekly book recommendation column. You can find out which newsletters you are signed up for here.