Press Review - Das Bilderlexikon der deutschen Schellack-Schallplatten - names & numbers
This massive picture book of German shel-lac records is hardly susceptible to a conven-tional review. Quite apart from the impossibil-ity of reading every page on a reasonable time scale, who other than the authors themselves is qualified to judge the contents? Band 1 starts with a brief history of the German record in-dustry up to the mid-fifties, followed by a tech-nical section defining terms and including an il-lustrated section on `Lisenzmarken' (copyright stamps). This section also includes some pic-tures of `Sprechpuppe' (talking dolls). The text proper begins on page 31 with 59 pages de-voted to anonymous discs, fifteen of which are indeed devoted to discs for Sprechpuppen. The format of the main text is label photo-graphs accompanied by a tabulation of Series-Owner-Manufacturer-Distribution-Repertoire-Dates of Issue, and a description of the label. Longer notes are also provided for many labels to elucidate histories too complicated for tab-ulation. Coverage extends to phantom labels (advertised or trade-marks registered but no issues made; there are a lot of the latter) and I have noted a few labels known only from liter-ature and therefore not illustrated.