Considered a trailblazer in the field of spoken-word recordings, Barbara Holdridge died on Monday, June 9. The longtime Northwest Baltimore resident was 95.
Born Barbara Ann Cohen on New York City’s Upper West Side, Holdridge was the daughter of a textile sales representative and a homemaker. She was a 1950 graduate of Hunter College, where she studied English literature, Greek and Latin. After graduation, she worked for Liveright Publishers in New York.
In 1952, Holdridge founded the Caedmon Records label with her college friend and business partner, Marianne Mantell, who worked as a producer in the recording industry.
Caedmon was a female-owned company specializing in gender equality and women’s writings. The company – named after a seventh-century Old English poet — is considered the first commercially successful label in the genre of audio books, today a billion-dollar industry.
“At least two generations have grown up knowing Caedmon Records,” Holdridge told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2002. “Strangers come up to me all the time and tell me what an impact those recordings made in their lives. And this was really the beginning of the spoken-word revolution.”
Among Caedmon’s earliest recordings was Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and his 1952 reading at New York’s Steinway Hall of his story, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” The recording sold more than 400,000 copies throughout the 1950s and was credited by the Library of Congress for “launching the audiobook industry.”
Other poets and authors who read their own works for Caedmon included Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Archibald MacLeish, Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings, Carl Sandburg, W.H. Auden Ezra Pound, Katherine Porter, Robert Frost and others. Actors Vanessa Redgrave, John Gielgud, Maggie Smith and Boris Karloff also read for Caedmon.
“We did not want to do a collection of great voices or important literary voices,” Holdridge told National Public Radio in 2002. “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.”
In a recent obituary on Holdridge, the New York Times wrote, “Under Ms. Holdridge and Ms. Mantell, Caedmon earned dozens of Grammy nominations and became the gold standard for spoken-word recordings.”
Based in midtown Manhattan with 36 employees, Caedmon was sold in 1970 to the D.C. Health and Company textbook publishing house, a subsidiary of Raytheon. Holdridge remained with the company for five more years. (Today, Caedmon Audio is a imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.)
In 1975, Holdridge – who moved to Baltimore 16 years earlier and commuted to Manhattan three days a week — founded Stemmer House Publishers, reportedly the first general book publisher in Maryland. Stemmer published fiction and non-fiction works, and the company became particularly known for its children’s books and International Design Library.
Holdridge sold Stemmer House Publishers in September of 2003 to Pathway Book Service in Keene, New Hampshire.
For many years, Holdridge served as an adjunct professor at Loyola University Maryland, where she taught writing and book publishing. She was the founder of Apprentice House Press, a hands-on boutique publishing house for students. The university’s department of communications eventually took over Apprentice House.
A well-respected expert on portraiture and folk art, Holdridge was considered the world’s leading authority on the 19th-century American portrait painter Ammi Phillips. Phillips was responsible for 700 portraits, many attributed to other artists or to “anonymous.”
In 2002, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and later in the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame.
“Today, we celebrate the life of Barbara Holdridge, a true trailblazer whose voice shaped an entire industry,” the National Women’s Hall of Fame recently posted on social media. “Holdridge’s vision — that recorded literature is ‘a third dimension for the printed page’ — transformed books into performances that resonated deeply with listeners.”
Along with her former Caedmon partner Marianne Mantell, Holdridge in 2001 was honored with a Special Lifetime Achievement Award at the Audie Awards, which recognizes achievements in the spoken-word industry.
In addition, she and her husband, Lawrence Barrett Holdridge, a Baltimore-based hydraulic engineer, were honored by the American Folk Art Museum in New York for their research on Ammi Phillips. In 1968, the Holdridges published the book, “Ammi Phillips: Portrait Painter, 1788-1865.”
For her dedication to creating the gardens and beautifying the grounds of her historic Georgian home, the 18th-century Stemmer House in Green Spring Valley, Holdridge received an award from the Baltimore County Historical Trust in 2007.
The house and its carriage house were listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
“Sometimes in the night, we hear sounds like walking footsteps, and we like to think it’s the friendly ghost of Capt. [John] Stemmer roaming the rooms of this house to which he gave his name,” Holdridge told The Sunday Sun.
A former resident of the historic Baltimore community of Dickeyville, Holdridge is survived by her daughters, Diana Holdridge and Eleanor Holdridge; and grandchildren, Megan Archibeque and Eliza Archibeque. She was predeceased by her husband of nearly 40 years, her sister, Gloria Cohen, and her parents, Howard and Bertha Cohen.
“Barbara was fiercely intelligent and independent for the entirety of her 95 years,” her family posted on the website of Sol Levinson & Bros. “She will be greatly missed by all that were lucky enough to know her.”
Services were held privately. Contributions in Holdridge’s memory may be sent to the American Horticultural Society, 7931 East Boulevard Drive, Alexandria, Virginia 22308, or at ahsgardening.org.
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