The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I have been re-reading John O'Hara's classic, "Appointment in Samarra". It is set at Christmastime in 1930. There are a few references to machines and the music of the time but I was really amused by this passage. The character Caroline visits her mother. She has just had a quarrel with her husband and feeling a little nostalgic.

“Mother, what did you do with all the old records?”
“What old records, dear? Do you mean the Victrola records? Those?”
“Yes. What did you do with them?”
“Oh, don’t you remember? I gave them to the Y.M.C.A. camp three years ago. You said at the
time you didn’t want them, only a few. You took some.”
“Oh, so I did.”
“If there’s any special one you want we could send for it. Mr. Peters would be glad to get it I’m
sure. He wants me to buy an autophonic and trade this one in, this Victrola. But I’d never use an
autophonic. I never use this one.”
“Orthophonic, Mother.”
“Orthophonic? It sounded like autophonic. Are you sure? Mr. Peters, I was sure he said
autophonic."

John O'Hara - Appointment in Samarra


Can anyone else think of novels of the time that reference machines and music?

One of the earliest appearances of the phonograph (or indeed any type of sound-reproducing machine) in a novel must be that in Bram Stoker's Dracula, published in 1897. Dr. Seward maintains a diary by dictating it onto cylinders; at one point a batch of the records is destroyed by fire and can be recognised only by the metal inserts at each end – a feature of early cylinders which is not often mentioned. Stoker was secretary to the great actor Sir Henry Irving and through him became acquainted with Colonel George Gouraud, Edison's representative in Britain, so that he would have been better informed about the phonograph than most people; certainly better than Arthur Conan Doyle, who in his 1891 short story The Voice of Science apparently thought that Edison's new machine recorded on 'slips' (perhaps a muddled reminiscence of the old tinfoil) and reproduced them by electricity.

In Kipling's Kim (1900–01) the title character has an encounter with a phonograph as part of his training as a spy. Lurgan Sahib, his mentor, uses it to try to frighten him, but Kim is not deceived by the supposed spirit-voices, and the machine comes off decidedly worse than the boy.

In Evelyn Waugh's Put Out More Flags (1942), the devious Basil Seal uses his influence in a government department to drive Ambrose Silk, a writer, into exile in Ireland under suspicion of treason. Seal then takes over Silk's apartment, whose amenities include a high-class gramophone (probably an Expert).

At the opposite end of the high-fidelity scale, Testimonies (1952) by Patrick O'Brian, afterwards famous for his nautical novels, describes (through the mouth of Joseph Pugh, a reclusive scholar living in a remote cottage in Wales) a technique of playing a record by using one's fingernail as both needle and diaphragm. I have never quite found the courage to try this.

Oliver Mundy.

Philo Vance: The Canary Murder Case
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canary_Murder_Case