Barbara Holdridge Obituary

Barbara Holdridge, the audiobook pioneer who has died aged 95, was the co-founder of the spoken-word record company Caedmon, which was launched in 1952 with a bestselling disc of Dylan Thomas reading his own work.

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Having named their label after the Old English bard Caedmon, often referred to as the first English poet, she and Marianne Mantell worked on records with Robert Frost, TS Eliot, WH Auden, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Edith Sitwell, Ogden Nash and JRR Tolkien (reading Poems and Songs of Middle Earth in both English and Elvish).

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The firm prospered and by 1966 its annual sales amounted to $14 million, making it one of the most successful American businesses of the era to be run by women, and paving the way for other spoken-word audio labels and later, with the advent of cassette tapes, the talking book. In 1970 the two co-founders sold Caedmon, and it now thrives as a division of HarperCollins, with much of its backlist of readings having recently been digitally restored.