The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

This box of wooden needles just came up on Ebay - according to the box lid, they are "Bettini" needles - is this right ? I didn't know Bettini used wooden needles....

I'm really not seeing "Bettini" in that inscription.

These are a mixture of standard and round shank fibre needles of the type made by Victor/HMV.
They probably date well after Bettini's brief involvement in the disc machine business.

I'm not seeing Bettini there either, but these are great to see. Did you buy them? If so, are the darker ones reddish or brownish (hard to tell from the photo). If reddish, they might be EMG Davey fibres, the best ever made bar none. Also that could just possibly be a stick of EMG lubricant, although neither useful nor interesting without its packaging!

I'll join the chorus of "don't see Bettini." Hard to decipher, but could it be "Benin"? That's a country in Africa, up until 1975 known as Dahomey (or so says Wikipedia); were needles ever made from the local woods there? Admittedly, 1975 is a long time after such things would have been likely to be produced, but then, nothing says the inscription is contemporary with the needles.

I'm no calligraphist, but it reads "Bernie made" to me

I think they are a significant piece of a very complicated Ponzi scheme involving bamboo needle futures, but that last line is missing the ending: Bernie Madoff...