The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

That is the starting price for a complete set of CLPGS journals. Mostly collected by George Frow and now sold by Dave Cooper.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Phonograph-Gr ... 0596333538

It will be interesting to see if anyone is tempted at this price.

Issues 1 to 220 are available direct from the CLPGS in CDr PDF format on a single disc for £60 including postage.

I don't like discs or reading from screens via pdf files. I'd much much rather have a real book in front of me. Call me old fashioned but....... well, go on then!

I like both, but neither price appeals to me!

I have a slight preference for reading from a real piece of paper, but that is outweighed by the ability to easily search through a well scanned and correctly OCR'd PDF - never mind the physical size and weight issues with several volumes of the real thing.

I've even used on-line searches and PDF indexes to help me find what I was looking for in the physical copies of magazines or books that I already own. Maybe that's just my disorganisation or bad memory!

epigramophone, is the £60 CLPGS CD OCR'd, indexed, and searchable as plain text? Are the scans decent quality? That's another thing that drives me back to physical copies: badly scanned diagrams and photos.

I'd rather have the PDF, if it's been done very well. There is the joy of owning the original artefact (and I think that's more relevant to 1920s gramophones magazines than 1980s society magazines), but I still remember my wife's face when I came home with a ¼ century run of The Gramophone Magazine. A CD ROM, or even a download, could have entered the house with far less disaprroval!

Cheers,
David.

P.S. Yes, I know The Gramophone Magazine is available on line, and I've even tried a brief subscription. The OCR is fairly unreliable, the pages are sometimes cropped, and the covers are mostly missing. Still, it's a reasonable source for the issues I don't have, but I don't want to subscribe to it for too long. It would soon enough cost more than buying all the physical copies!

EDIT: Look what Google found!
http://www.clpgs.org.uk/pdf%20files/Hil ... %20PDF.pdf
The complete index for Hill and Dale news, in PDF form, freely available from the CLPGS website. That's jolly decent of them!

As you have discovered, there is an index, but as I do not have a copy of the CD I cannot comment on the production quality.

If it is up to the standard of the CLPGS Reference Series discs, it should be good.

I too would prefer to own the original magazines, although not at £400, but my bookshelves are already overflowing. I can still remember my wife's face when I bought a large number of "Sound Wave" magazines at auction.......

Didn't sell.