Milo Bloom wrote:I have a dozen or so records that I'm pretty sure ended up coming into my house via my father-in-law, but I have no idea where he might have gotten them.
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I have two of these folders. This is the one in better shape of the two and is not written in. The other one has writing and is a little more beat up.
These are some of the records. There are a lot of fox trots for some reason. Someone must have liked to fox trot.
There are no records related to the Ed Sullivan ad... just a neat piece.
The fox trot was the big dance craze of the post-World War I period, and they were the staples of every company's catalogue at the time--or, at least, of every company that didn't specialize in other types of music, such as religious or ethnic of one sort or another.
The Alma Gluck and Paul Whiteman records are "right" for the period of the machine--acoustic (i.e., pre-microphone) recordings that would have been on the market around the time it was made. The Toscanini is much later, from some time in the '40s, part of an electrically recorded set. While you certainly can play it on your Victrola, it may well not sound all that great (too strongly recorded, too much bass for the reproducer to handle comfortably, etc.), and it will likely suffer more wear from playing (by that point, records were formulated for somewhat lighter-tracking electric pickups, "somewhat lighter-tracking" being very relative, as by modern standards they still were anvils!). One other thing to have done besides servicing the motor is to have the reproducer "rebuilt," which is to say at a minimum have the gasket tubing around the diaphragm replaced, another routine and inexpensive bit of maintenance. The old natural rubber almost certainly will have hardened with age, and once that happens the sound will be blasty and harsh. The diaphragm needs to ride on nicely elastic tubes to yield the quite lovely sound it was designed to.
Back to the Toscanini for a minute, as noted, that's part of a set, splitting up a complete long work, here Tchaikowsky's first piano concerto, into successive segments, each playing about 4 minutes, the most music a 12-inch 78 record of the day could hold. Play them in order, you get the entire long piece with a break at the end of each side. You should have that and three other companion records. See that little "M 800 1" notation at about 9:00 on the label? That means it was from Victor's red seal classical set no. 800, manual sequence (automatic sequence would be DM for drop changers or AM for slide-off changers, although I think by that point AM coupling was no longer being done), side 1. From there, pairings on each physical record would be 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8; play the first side, flip the record, play the second side, substitute the second record, play its first side (side 3 of the set), etc. In a DM set, they would be 1-8, 2-7, 3-6, 4-5 so you could just flip the stack over after playing the first 4 records. AM couplings would be 1-5, 2-6, 3-7, 4-8.
Incidentally, I've read in an article by one of the big-name critics of the day that at a concert with this concerto on the program, you could count on it that at a certain point about 4 minutes in a big part of the audience would start to stand up. That was where the first side break fell in Artur Rubinstein's universally popular recording of the piece.
As others have noted, the Victrola XI was a strong seller and isn't particularly rare today, but $80 for one in nice shape like that, mechanically sound with original finish that can be restored rather than being messed up beyond repair, is a steal. Well done! Congrats, and welcome to the wonderful, wacky world of antique records and phonos!