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Here are several really, really nice Blue Amberol 5000 series Fox Trots. These are some of the most desirable records around. All of these are in E condition in an original box. They are all HOT Fox Trots.

The price is $175 each, plus shipping and ins.

5100 – A Cup of Coffee Fox Trot M. Special
5279 – Fire Fox Trot E. Olivers Jazz Babies
5296 – Yankee Rose Fox Trot Oreste and his Orchestra
5299 – Blue Skies Fox Trot D. Voorhees & Orchestra
5485 – An Old Guitar and Old Refrain Fox Trot E. Golden and his Orchestra

If you have interest, please contact me at [email protected]

Could someone elaborate on why the 5000 series are valuable? I am more of a machine than record collector. Are they more "listenable"? Thanks

I THINK it is because they are rare, i know they were made around 1929 JUST before edison closed down his factory

USlakeside wrote:Could someone elaborate on why the 5000 series are valuable? I am more of a machine than record collector. Are they more "listenable"? Thanks

First, there really isn't a 5000 "series", it's just that 5000 is a nice round number that corresponds roughly to when pressing quantities starting getting really small. "Popular" Blue Amberols were numbered sequentially starting at 1501. The last number actually released was 5719, but numbers up to 5732 were assigned.

Starting around 1923 (record numbers in the high 4000s), the average quantity pressed of each record had dwindled to around 1000 copies, though some were clearly made in larger numbers. By 1926 (record numbers around 5150) the average was 800, and at the very end in 1929 (record numbers 5700+), only about 100 of each title were pressed. Ron Dethlefson's Blue Amberol books have more details, including examples of Edison's stock cards showing how many copies were ordered and pressed for selected titles.

Adding to the scarcity is modern taste. Today's collectors are not very interested in religious music, country music, Hawaiian music, and so on. The "late" fox trots are few in both number of titles and number of copies available. There are now far more collectors for these than there are copies available, so the prices have gone way up.

This should not be taken to mean that everything above 5000 or so is expensive. Vernon Dalhart 5000 "series" cylinders appear on Ebay for $10 or so farily regularly. I myself bought a dozen Hawaiian 5000s a few years back for a total of something like $75.

Hope this helps.

The late-numbered cylinders, in my limited experience, are some of the worst-sounding dubs that I own. IMO they were carelessly dubbed, with much less care than in the early post-1915 days.
I agree that the low production totals and appealing (for Edison) titles will keep some of these cylinders selling at a premium price.
Bob

You're right - so many of the dubs are slap-dash, complete with starting and ending clunks that can allow you to envision a disaffected technician making them without much care.

But then some of them are crisp and amazing. Some of the Kinsey Midmer-Losh organ records are really nice sounding, and I have a few BA Rolfe and GG Orchestra selections that are excellent. Poke around on YouTube and you can find some good examples of late cylinders to assess.

I think it depends on the luck of the draw, guessing that perhaps they were told to only try the dub a small number of times, and whatever was best of the lot had to be good enough.

After all, the fact that the cylinders were even kept in production was for honor rather than profit, so from a business point of view "good enough" would have had to be good enough!

On the earlier post about the number of cylinders pressed...

The mold number is denoted by the small numeral on the rim. Just before that small numeral is a number of tiny dots, and the number of dots is the take number used to create the mold.

When helping Ron research the books at the Edison site...just about 21 years ago now...I was the lucky guy who found the smoking gun, the document which explains that each mold was good for about 800 pressings. (it's literally my only claim to fame, so I gotta grab kudos where I can)

So unless they had severely cut back on the number of cylinders made from each mold during those end times, one can get a rough approximation of where in the production range a cylinder lies by merely multiplying the small numeral found on the rim by 800.

(On big sellers they would at times wear out the master for a given take, and start pressing from an alternative take, so checking the dots can lead to hearing two versions of the same selection. This is not going to happen with cylinders with catalog numbers 5000 and later, of course. I don't have the books handy so I can't remember whether we had also some indication of how many molds were made from each master. I oughta go dig it out.)