Barbara Holdridge, a pioneer for spoken-word recordings, dies at 95. In 1952, she and her friend Marianne Mantell founded Caedmon Records, putting out LP records of poets and authors reading their ...

Barbara Holdridge, the audiobook pioneer who has died aged 95, was the co-founder of the spoken-word record company Caedmon, ...

Marianne Mantell, left, with Caedmon Records co-founder Barbara Holdridge in New York circa 1953. Unable to afford movers in the early days of their company, they used a wheelbarrow to push vinyl ...

In a sense, Caedmon brought the idea of oral interpretation of poetry, short stories and novels from the Beatnik dens of Greenwich Village into middle-class living rooms.

Caedmon releases, Businesswoman Mantell estimates, have reached an audience of 2,000,000—many of them “people who haven’t picked up a book of poetry since they left school.

Barbara Holdridge and a friend found unlikely commercial success in the 1950s with recordings of such famous writers as Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot reciting their work. Holdridge died Monday at 95.

Caedmon recorded or reissued Faulkner, Frost, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath and Eudora Welty. To read historical works like Shakespeare and Chekhov, it recruited Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave.

Poetry has been a big part of this country’s cultural life since Caedmon – a Northumbrian cow herd – composed a catchy religious ode back in the seventh century. Shakespeare, Wordsworth ...

An Old English poet. There is one other name that deserves to be mentioned, and that is Caedmon. He is the first poet in English whose name is known.

They named their label after an Old English poet, an 8th-century cowherd named Caedmon, and adopted the slogan “A Third Dimension for the Printed Page,” announcing their belief that a spoken ...