6-16-2025 4:34am

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Hunt Valley Life Staff

Audiobook Pioneer Barbara Holdridge Dies at 95

By Jim Milliot, publishersweekly.com

Courtesy Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame

Barbara Holdridge, an audiobook industry pioneer who cofounded the first commercially successful label for spoken-word recordings, died on June 9 at her home in Baltimore. She was 95.

In early 1952, Holdridge and Marianne Mantell, recent graduates of Hunter College, convinced Welsh poet Dylan Thomas to allow them to record him reading some of his poetry after seeing him perform at New York City's 92nd Street Y. The recording would be the first offering from Holdridge and Mantell’s Caedmon Records. In a March 2002 PW story marking the 50th anniversary of the launch of Caedmon, Holdridge recounted how her and Mantell invested $1,500 to start the label and gradually added recordings by W.B. Yeats, Eudora Welty, T.S. Eliot, and William Faulkner to their list.

"We thought there was a need and a market for spoken-word recordings of authors reading their works," Holdridge told PW. "When Dylan Thomas fell into our laps, so to speak, we seized on that as our time to proceed with our idea. We were never interested in just getting the voices. We wanted to recreate the moment of creation for these authors, what they were feeling, what they invested in their writings at the time of inception. We never cared if they had great voices or not."

Caedmon’s early staff included a number of employees who succeeded beyond the audiobook world, including Mike Nichols, who was Caedmon’s first employee and head of shipping before making his name as a film director. Holdridge and Mantell sold Caedmon to the publisher D.C. Heath in 1970 and 17 years later HarperCollins (then Harper & Row) acquired Caedmon to bolster is audiobook business.

Holdridge left Caedmon shortly after the sale to D.C. Heath. She went on to found Stemmer House Publishers in 1975 after she and her husband bought the 18th-century Stemmer House in Owings Mills, Md. In 2003, Holdridge sold Stemmer House to Pathway Book Services. At the time of the sale, Stemmer had approximately 130 active titles, including spoken-word audio titles. Stemmer House was best known for its children's books and the International Design Library line, a series of sourcebooks for artists and others in the creative field.

Though Holdridge was no longer deeply involved in audiobooks after the sale of Caedmon, both her and Mantell, who died in 2023, continued to be recognized as true pioneers of the audiobook industry. In 1992, Caedmon received a Peabody Award, which cited the company's contribution to American arts and letters, and in June 2001, Holdridge and Mantell accepted an Audie Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Audio Publishers Association.

"That was really Marianne's and my celebration of the 50th anniversary," Holdridge said of the Audie occasion. Holdridge also expressed no regrets about selling the company she helped to launch. "Harper is doing an excellent job of keeping the label alive," she said. When asked by PW if her and Mantell's vision from 50 years ago had been realized, Holdridge replied, "Yes, very much so. More than we ever could have imagined."