Barbara Holdridge, who co-founded a spoken-word recording firm that preserved the voices of renowned 20th-century poets, writers and actors, died of old-age complications Monday at her Quarry Lake home in Baltimore County. She was 95.

Her firm, Caedmon Records, recorded the likes of T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Marianne Moore and Tennessee Williams, as well as performing arts figures Laurence Olivier, Ingrid Bergman, Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, Montgomery Clift, Carol Channing and James Mason, among others.

She is considered a pioneer of the audiobook publishing and recording industry.

Born in New York City, she was the daughter of Bertha Gold Cohen, a homemaker, and Herbert L. Cohen, who worked in textile sales. She was an honors graduate of Hunter College and soon became an assistant editor at the Liveright publishing house. In her free time she read the files of Liveright’s literary luminaries.

She and her college chum Marianne Roney Mantell (they met in a Greek literature class) were both then 22. They founded Caedmon Records with about $1,500 and soon tracked down the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who was in New York for a literary tour. They signed him with a $500 advance and a promise of 10% of the royalties.

He was their first poet in a catalog that would eventually encompass works of famous authors from Robert Frost to Sylvia Plath to Shakespeare.

In a 2002 Baltimore Sun interview, Ms. Holdridge recalled being dogged to get Thomas into the recording studio. She called him at 5 in the morning. She figured, correctly, he was just getting in from a night of heavy drinking.

Ms. Holdridge and her business partner eventually got the poet to a microphone at the Steinway Studios. He read “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” the poem written on the eve of his father’s death.

“He stood, but every once in a while he would sit on the ledge of the stage and smoke a cigarette and then go on,” Ms. Holdridge said in the interview. “It was a small studio. We were right there in front of him, being the audience. We were always very good at being an audience.”

Almost as an afterthought, they had the poet also record his “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” the surprise hit of the recording session. That record sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

“Holdridge and Mantell went on to record T.S. Eliot in London and the painter Diego Rivera in Mexico City, but Holdridge failed to get Pablo Picasso in France when Jacqueline Roque, his second wife, threatened her with arrest if she so much as showed up,” according to the Sun article.

“My mother and her partner were considered feminist in an era that was not,” said her daughter, Diana Holdridge. “I think the recording industry looked down on them at first.”

Writers brought their work to her for possible publication. A Baltimore engineer, Lawrence Holdridge, wrote a book of fantasy in the “Lord of the Rings” vein and carried his volume to her for consideration as a Caedmon recording. She never recorded the book, but the two hit it off, began dating and eventually married in 1959.

They settled at the Ashland Chapel, a historic building in the center of Baltimore’s Dickeyville neighborhood, while she was commuting to New York for parts of the week. Ms. Holdridge soon joined the fight against a planned highway through Leakin Park. She was also a civil rights activist.

Ms. Holdridge later purchased Stemmer House, an Owings Mills historic home on 30 acres.

“My mother became a major, passionate gardener,” her daughter said.

She also branched into art history and researched the work of the 19th-century American portrait painter Ammi Phillips.

Ms. Holdridge and her partner sold Caedmon to Raytheon in 1971. Caedmon is now part of HarperCollins. She later founded and was editor of Stemmer House Publishers, and also served as adjunct professor of writing, editing and proofreading at Loyola University Maryland.

She wrote to The Sun last year with a suggestion for naming the former Key Bridge, which had tragically collapsed after being struck by a container ship: “We can best do this by naming the new bridge the Maryland Memorial Bridge for all who lived, worked and died in Maryland. All those memorialized under its new name will be even more likely to be remembered through the years ahead.”

Survivors include two daughters, Diana Holdridge, of Boise, Idaho and Eleanor Holdridge, of Syracuse, New York; and two granddaughters. Her husband, Lawrence Barrett Holdridge, an engineering firm owner, died in 1998.

Services are private.

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