Barbara Holdridge

Barbara Holdridge, together with her business partner, Marianne (Roney) Mantell, co-founded Caedmon Records in 1952. As an entirely women-owned company Caedmon stressed gender equality and focused on women’s writings. She was a pioneer in the genre of spoken word literary recordings, and is considered to have laid the foundation for modern audio books.

Barbara Ann Holdridge née Cohen was born in 1929 in New York City.

Holdridge attended Hunter College in New York, receiving her BA in 1950 after majoring in Humanities. She graduated cum laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She continued her graduate education in Humanities at Columbia University, also in New York, but then turned her attention to founding Caedmon Records with her college friend Marianne Roney, in 1952.

In 1959 Barbara Cohen married Larry Holdridge, a self-taught and self-employed hydraulic engineer, and they moved to Maryland. Together they raised twin daughters, Eleanor and Diana.

In 1952 Holdridge was working for a book publisher and Roney (later Mantell) was employed at a recording studio. When they heard that the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was going to be speaking at the 92nd Street YMCA, they went to hear him read his poetry. The partners sent Thomas a note offering him a business proposition: to record Thomas reading his poetry and the partners would market the recording under their newly conceived record label, Caedmon Records. Thomas agreed, and on February 22, 1952, at Steinway Hall, Thomas, Holdride and Mantell made history with the poet’s reading of his story, “A Child's Christmas in Wales” on the B side of the album. With this one act the partners accomplished two things, cementing the poet’s career as well as birthing the audiobook industry.

The partners set up a small office in New York and began to invite other poets and authors to read their own works to be disseminated as recordings. The line-up of writers they engaged reads like a list of the best and most well-known writers of the 20th century. The pair recorded Thomas Mann, E. E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Marianne Moore, Eudora Welty and many more. By 1959 Caedmon had revenues of $500,000, and by 1966 Caedmon (which was named for the first known English poet) had grossed $14 million and had 36 employees working in their 8,000 square foot office in midtown Manhattan, close to the Empire State Building.

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