I would like to recommend "The Music Goes Round" by Fred Gaisberg as an essential read for the serious student of phonographic history. This book was quoted extensively in other early histories, such as "From Tinfoil to Stereo" and "The Fabulous Phonograph". I correctly guessed from those extracts that there was much more to learn if I could find a complete copy of the book. Far from dry, it is a very entertaining and informative book that I believe others would enjoy as much as I have.
"The Music Goes Round" by Fred Gaisberg, published in 1942, was an autobiography of his work as a pioneer recording engineer and talent spotter for The Gramophone Company (later ‘His Master’s Voice’). His book covers the early history of the Columbia, Berliner and the Gramophone companies, the technicalities of early recording and the humorous and emotional demands of dealing with divas. He travelled extensively and he wrote of the recording sessions in Europe and throughout Asia, and of his funny reactions to foreign music and culture.
More about Fred Gaisberg can be read at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_GaisbergThere is an 1893 Columbia brown wax cylinder shown on YouTube where "Professor Gaisberg" announces the title and his piano accompaniment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHElBpc4c5kOriginal copies of the book are hard to come by. I casually waited to find an original (and affordable!) edition of this book for many years, but nothing happened. After scouring eBay daily for over a year, I finally bought one.
This morning I searched the Interet with my smartphone to locate an online copy of the book and found one at:
https://archive.org/details/musicgoesround011057mbp and read through a few pages. Later today when I returned there to copy a link from that website for this review, I could no longer download the text and .PDF files as I had before. The page with currently dead links on archive.org is still there. Just weird. What's up with that, archive.org? Anyway, at least I have transferred those digital copies to my hard drive. (wink, wink)