[ARSCLIST] How many 78's--was: National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) Study

[steven c <stevenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- 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/