The Edison DD sleeves did have the acid problem as did most of the time however the paper is much heavier, like the thickness of a paper grocery bag, in most cases, probably to compensate for the much heavier weight of an individual disc record.
As John points out, at least on the earlier ones, into the late teens you were supposed to cut off the bottom corners. Cutting off the corners meant the disc in the sleeve could drop right into the drawer style cabinet of an A, B, or C250, W 250 etcetera series DD machine. If you've tried to store DD records in orignal sleeves with corners cut in a DD machine you see that the frictiion of the sleeves sliding against eachother quickly causes alot of wear and invites tearing, especially along the seams as they start to come loose and catch on eachother.
Another reason the sleeves tend to be hard to find is that with the introduction of the "19" series of phonograph, C19, W19, and others, the phonograph contained a record cabinet with individual slots for each record. The only way to get the record into the cabinet was WITHOUT the sleeve. I'm sure most people just bought records and threw the sleeves away. Also by this time they had gone to the generic "Edison Record" sleeve with no specific information about the particular record on the sleeve so there was no need to keep the sleeve to retain information about the artist or the history of the piece, (see below for more info re types of sleeves).
The earliest types of sleeves I've seen were solid sleeves. (No hole for viewing title of the record). The title's for each side were glued onto the upper quarter of the sleeve on a piece of paper about abotu 2 inches wide and 9 inches long, one title on the right and one on the left half of this paper. Under each title was quite a narrative, a paragraph or so, on the artist and about the song itself, who wrote it, it's history etcetera. These were generally dark grey or dark blue, steel blue. The title paper was heavy brown with black and sometimes red print.
A bit later they came with same design but with center cut out so you could also read the title info on the record.
by the early 20s all this was dropped and all sleeves were generic,hole in center, light brown containing first the "Edison Re-Creation" title at the top then the "Edison Records" oval logo on the front alongside an attractive woman next to a Chippendale upright C19. Since there was no specific info related to the title and because the phonographs of the day had record cabinets which accomodated records without the sleeve.... throw it away!
So in summary I'd say the relative lack of availability of these sleeves today is due to a variety of reasons,
- relatively heavy record is hard on paper
- acid in paper
- encouraging people to cut the corners
- later Edison phonos designed to store records without sleeves
I've often wondered about the pros and cons of storing records in sleeves in plastic. For me the jury is out but I'm betting it's the right way to go. The reason is in the past I've bought alot of NOS DDs that were stored together in original sleeves for many years. The sleeves look like new within the circular outline of the record where the records are pressed tightly against eachother. Where the sleeves exhibit wear and deterioration is outside the perimiter of the record where they have often deteriorated to a notably more sigificant extent.
So... as you might have guessed, while not common you can find these in original sleeves. I've not counted mine but surely in the hundreds. I've put all my original sleeve DDs into plastic liners for safe keeping.
Hope you guys find this rambling at least somewhat interesting.
