The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I've had the Walsh book for quite a while and am unsure how many copies were printed.
I think Mr. Riggs longest work is a book about Billy Murray. He retired in Edmond, OK. I went to his estate sale and bought his copy of the book and some other interesting items.

dennis wrote: Thu Jun 24, 2021 2:28 pm Quentin Riggs wrote some articles and at least one book about early recording artists. Google his obit: Quentin T. Riggs.

IIRC, he contributed some articles to Tim Gracyk's "Victrola & 78 Journal" too, but I'd have to check again.

For those interested there are listed on the Internet Archive 1579 pages of Jim Walsh’s old articles from Hobbies magazine.

https://archive.org/details/FavoritePio ... ingArtists

You would need a basement full of old Hobbies magazines to try and duplicate this. Because I once tried to do something similar

I don't know. My public library has bound volumes of Hobbies complete from the 1930's to the 1980's and they don't take up that much room. Several shelves to be sure. Could be 500-600 issues perhaps.

Thanks for the IA link. I looked there once for Walsh's articles and they weren't there at the time.

Without getting too far off Walsh, Stephen Fassett and Aida Favia-Artsay also wrote articles for Hobbies on 78 rpm recording artists. Fassett's column was called "Historical Records" and covered a fairly broad range of topics. Favia-Artsay wrote about opera singers and also published a book on Caruso's records.

Wolfe, your very fortunate that your library has bound hard copies of Hobbies Magazine. But the day will surely come when they will disappear to appease the gods of remodeling and lack of space. And also lack of funding. The local libraries in my tri-county area have all succumb to space saver shelving and digital storage. My professional 30 years experience as a audio visual manager at a community college, has had me see many multimedia/paper collections tossed to make room for the next latest thing.

And at one time I had a basement full of rescued stuff But then I moved

I do miss the actual tactile feeling of those paper pages, but the internet archive makes it much easier on my back

I have what I believe is a complete set of original Hobbies magazines from 1942 when Jim Walsh first began writing his "Favorite Pioneer Recording Artists" column through 1985 when he ended the column in Hobbies. I purchased most of mine from one estate auction about 25 years ago. The original owners had packaged all of the Hobbies magazines by complete year into brown paper bags and carefully wrapped each in a plus sign pattern (like ribbon on a Christmas present) with old white string and labelled each with "Hobbies 1942", "Hobbies 1943", etc. I've only looked through a few of them and my patient wife has been asking me to "do something with them" for years as they just take up space on several heavy duty shelf units here.

Doug

Thanks for the link to LOC. I'm reading it and it's very interesting...

Doug, I think what your wife is hinting at is she wants you put large book shelves next to her bed so she can have easy access to all those Hobbies mags! I took piles of Hobbies mags to the APS show and had some trouble giving them away. Mine were from the late 50s to the 70s.