The Eastern Talking Machine Company

[Zenger]

Greetings, everyone. As a follow-up to another post I just published in the Music section (viewtopic.php?f=3&t=53837), I am posting here to see if anyone has any information about the Eastern Talking Machine Company of Boston, Mass., which was apparently an early dealer/supplier of phonographs and accessories. I had never heard of them until I found an early Columbia B (serial number 80272) that had an Eastern Talking Machine stamped plate instead of the standard Columbia plate. This weekend, I found at an estate sale some brown wax cylinders (seemingly all Columbias), four of which were in their original cases, which lacked company labels, and were, instead, stamped "The Eastern Talking Machine Co." and the business's address. I have searched online and can find absolutely nothing of substance about the company. Can anyone tell me anything about it, or direct me to some online resource that I missed? (And if you would kindly consider taking a look at my post about these cylinders in the "Music" section and chiming in, I would appreciate it -- many more questions there!)
Thanks!

[Silvertone]

Eastern was a major jobber in the industry. There's a nice photo of the office here:

https://www.shorpy.com/node/5450?size=_original#caption

[52089]

I have nothing of substance to add, except that I have a few of those boxes as well, all of which had badly decayed, very brittle, unplayable and/or broken brown wax cylinders. I vaguely recall reading somewhere that Eastern may have issued their own cylinders at one time, but I have no source for that info.

[Zenger]

Thanks for the link -- I have seen that picture before (or, I should say, a copy of it) on Ebay. Considering how long the company seems to have been around, and how much business they did, there is surprisingly little about them to be found online. What am I missing?

As for the cylinders, this time I got really lucky -- based on how they were wrapped, it is possible that at least some of them had ever been removed from their boxes before. (See pictures.) And one is identified by an announcer as being a Columbia product. If ETMCo actually made and sold their own cylinders, that would make it even more surprising to me that there's nothing about them online.