----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Fine" <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, May 15, 2006 5:00 PM
I honestly didn't know there were 80,000 unique 78 sides recorded! What is
the material?
Steven, do you think you have more disks than Joe Bussard? Did I
understand you correctly that you
have 40 THOUSAND unique 78's (ie no repeats)? Or, how much of that is
overlap?
My educated guess is that there were probably somewhere between
two and three million different 78rpm discs issued between
Berlier's 1889 efforts and the last music-library 78's (pressed
in the UK but extensively used in North America).
Victor alone used over 104,000 matrix numbers between 1900 and
1942 (assume 10% to 20% weren't issued, or the numbers were never
used...that is still 80 to 90 thousand sides!)...Columbia used
about 40,000 before 1934, and the Plaza/ARC/CBS series ran from
5001 to somewhere in the 60,000's not counting non-NYC matrices.
As far as my own holdings...I won't know until I finish my "pre-
catalog" project. However, I'd estimate about 2,000 duplicate
phonorecords max, if that...and there will be a number of cases
where I have the same side on more than one disc, usually with
a different pairing. However, I already have almost 20,000
78's "pre-catalogued" and as near as I can tell I haven't
been through half of my milk boxes yet...so the question
is whether my number of duplicates will be somewhere close
to my final count's excess over 40,000.
...stevenc
http://users.interlinks.net/stevenc/