The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I picked up a small box lot of cylinders today and it included a very poor quality reproduction of an Edison amberol box. The graphics were poor and non exact, and printed on the label was "Facsimile Printing 1983". Construction fit and finish was not up to Edison standards. What was also interesting was there was a paper included that described the history of the cylinder industry and referred to the box as a reproduction. There are pictures below. The repro is the one on the left.

I would have expected that anyone producing a reproduction box would be doing so for the collector community and would have known that anyone buying them would 1 - expect a better attempt at achieving a box that is authentic looking, and, 2 - the purchaser would already know what was printed on the insert (and them soom) (Hint, the typo is real )

I have never seen one of these before. Does anyone know anything about them? Who and why where they produced? Do many still exist in our collections?

How odd is that? I've never heard about this, and I'm puzzled as to why anyone would have gone to the expense to print this label - in color yet. You're right, Brad - whoever was behind this wasn't too well-versed in phono & record history. I suspect they soon learned that these Amberol boxes are commonly found - - it all strikes me as the activity of a beginner before he learned much about the field. "A little learning is a dangerous thing..." An interesting little artifact!

George P.

That's interesting. Thanks for sharing, Brad. I wonder how many of these were made.

Very odd indeed. It's the 1983 date that flummoxes me: I mean, that is the beginning of what I think of as the " modern" era of phonograph and record collecting. By that time there was a respectable amount of solid resources available to the collector. If this had dated from the 60's I wouldn't have been quite so surprised. There were were some gawdawful reprints circulating in those days. I think of that guy in Drumheller Alberta who did some appallingly bad publications based on bad reprints of the Red Seal section of the Victor Catalogue. I'm having a mental block of his name; perhaps fortuitously. If there weren't so much phono info on the slip one might wonder if weren't for a display of advertising history.

Jim

I neglected to mention, but the box will hold a cylinder and is lined with the soft cotton batting (or whatever it is called). It was a serious attempt, just poorly executed. I expected that others here would have seen one before.

Maybe I have the ONLY ONE!

OK, let's look at this in the context of the time period in which it was made. It was a major (and expensive) effort to do color copying, let alone accurately. At that time PCs were in their infancy; no color scanners, printers, Photoshop, etc. Just to do this as well as they did was an accomplishment and, probably relatively expensive too. Perhaps someone just wanted some boxes to house their own cylinders, couldn't find them and got creative. At least they are dated so no one can ever pass them off as originals.
Admittedly, the guy was short on his knowledge of phono history but that was much more common then, too. I started collecting seriously in 1970 when I was 25, although I had collected since I was about 8 years old. FTTS and The Fabulous Phonograph were about the only commonly available books and even they were hard to find. The first time I read FTTS I borrowed a "liberated" library copy from a friend. Misinformation was everywhere, usually in the form of anecdotes from old men in the antiques business. A tremendous amount of serious research has been done and made available since then. We all thank George, Tim and many other authors of today, as well as some prominent ones who are no longer with us, for their diligent efforts to bring accurate knowledge to our hobby.
I think an artifact such as this simply serves to show how far the hobby has progressed in 27 years.

Jim

Interesting take on it Jim. You make a good point - we do take for granted how easy it is to copy and print things these days. Though, I don't think the cost between what was done and doing it right would have been that great.