Dealer sticker

[Lenoirstreetguy]

Dealer stickers on cylinder boxes seem to be the latest fetish and so here's one I just found. The green of the sticker matches the "Amberola" green of the box.
Jim

[Jerry B.]

I can't remember where I've seen it, but I saw a sticker on a cylinder that advertised Victor products as well as other brands.

[Lenoirstreetguy]

Victor and Edison had a sort of entente cordiale with many dealers offering both lines until Edison introduced the Diamond Disc and things went off the rails. In the first years of the century dealers often carried several lines, but around 1908 or so Edison got touchy with it's dealers and demanded that they carry the Edison cylinder line ONLY. This was a marketing mistake, if you ask me, in that it reduced the market for the cylinder business in general, but one suspects that one of the reasons was the fact that Columbia and U S Everlasting had introduced a celluloid cylinder at a time when Edison was introducing the rather fragile wax Amberols. But ...and the plot thickens....some dealers got away with handling both Victor and Edison AFTER the introduction of the diamond disc. Take a gander at this page from the Edison Phonograph Monthly from September 1915 . It shows the spiffy store of the R S Williams branch in Hamilton , Ontario. In the left foreground...all highlighted is a B 250 Diamond Disc, but if you enlarge this and look at the murky machine on the RIGHT,you will see a Victrola XVI, so obviously some dealers were more equal than others. The framed pic is a photo of Tetrazzini as Lakme . She was never an Edison artist. This is doubly strange since Berliner in Canada was even more rabid in enforcing exclusivity than was Victor in the States. Not only that but RS Williams were the Edison JOBBERS for Ontario. Very curious.

Jim