Given my penchant for collecting San Francisco Symphony recordings, I have made the acquaintance of quite a few antiquarian record dealers. They're a great bunch of folks, gracious, reliable, and wonderfully dedicated to the preservation of old records. It's a sweet little corner of the retail cosmos.
I note that quite a few vendors enjoy tucking in extra goodies along with one's order. Recently two separate purchases came with antique liner jackets added just for good measure. The first comes from the Victor Talking Machine company, and the second is a dealer sleeve for 78 RPM records from a Copenhagen store.
Frances Alda on Victor Records
First up, the Victor sleeve, product of the great American company that in 1929 would merge with the Radio Corporation of America to become the behemoth RCA Victor, still making records all these years later even in its twilight incarnation within the gaping maw of Sony Classical. It shows Frances Alda, a popular opera singer of the early 20th century, with listings and prices from her current catalog. I decided to see if I could date the sleeve by consulting my well-thumbed copy of The Victor Red Seal Discography by John R. Bolig. I find that the most recent records on the sleeve were the two discs made in partnership with violinist Mischa Elman—the Gounod Ave Maria and the Angel's Serenade. Those were recorded in 1915. All the others on the sleeve are earlier; the Trovatore Miserere with Caruso was put down in 1910, while the other collaborations with the legendary Italian tenor date from 1912. She recorded "Un bel di" from Madama Butterfly in 1913.
Incidentally, note that Madama Butterfly was all of nine years old in 1913. Puccini's big operas were immediate hits while their main arias entered the repertory with almost unseemly haste. That sort of thing doesn't happen all that much any more, if at all. What is the most recent opera to become solidly standard repertory? At least at the level of La Bohème or Tosca or Butterfly or, for that matter, Verdi's Falstaff and Otello? Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes perhaps, but it's not all that familiar and certainly contains no arias that hit the jackpot à la Puccini. I suppose Porgy & Bess qualifies—but it's approaching its eightieth birthday!
Victor Records Sleeve, Rear
I digress. Alda recorded throughout the 'teens and well into the twenties. Her final Victor record came out in 1928, although she continued to appear on the radio for at least a decade or longer. Since 1915 is the cutoff for the records on the jacket, I consulted the flip side and noted the January 1, 1915 date on the "License Notice." So I think it's pretty safe to say that this item is 97 years old, approaching its first century. And yet there's Nipper the Dog up there, listening to his master's voice in rapt fascination, just as he would remain on RCA Victor, HMV, and EMI record labels for generations to come.
Knud W. Hartmann's store in Copenhagen
The Hartmann's music store jacket is in its own way just as fascinating. It's not as old as the Victor jacket, nor can I date it with quite the same precision. A few clues help me along, however. For one thing, the store sold Marconi radios and Polyphon gramophones. Polyphon, originally makers of coin-operated music boxes, made gramophones into the 1930s while Marconi soldiered on for a good while longer.
A Polyphon gramophone
Then there are the two record labels listed on the sleeve. "His Master's Voice", or HMV, was the name for The Gramophone Co., Ltd., for most of the teens and twenties the English branch of both the Victor Talking Machine Company and its successor RCA Victor. Both HMV and RCA also made record players, such as the HMV model pictured on the Hartmann jacket. Many American Victor and RCA records were released in Europe on HMV. Consider these two copies of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, recorded by Pierre Monteux and the San Francisco Symphony in 1945. The first is the American release on RCA Victor; the second is the English release on HMV.
Monteux and the SFS record Le Sacre: US on the left, Europe on the right
There is also a Columbia logo on the jacket, and that particular European incarnation of Columbia was past history by the late 1930s. Both Columbia and HMV were folded into the umbrella company EMI, very much alive and kicking to this day. (From the 1950s on, classical EMI recordings were distributed in the United States as Angel Records.)
So I put it altogether and come up with a tentative dating of mid-1930s for Knud W. Hartmann's in-store sleeve. He specialized in popular music, obviously, as he plugs his "dance" and "entertainment" (Underholdnings) music.
I would never put a 78 RPM record into those sleeves. For one thing, the Victor/Alda sleeve would crumble. For another, the Hartmann sleeve has been stapled together and could very well take a chunk out of the shellac on the disc. But more to the point, once you have given a 78 RPM disc a thorough cleaning, the last thing you want to do is to tuck it into a musty old jacket. My 78s wind up in nice fresh heavy-paper sleeves and crisp new cardboard outer jackets, where with any luck they will ride out their next century of existence with the same panache that has characterized their history so far.