In response to Bryan Cather's enquiry about Pianolist's Library rolls,
I dashed down to my roll collection this morning before heading for
work (late as usual).

I've got 30 or 40 of these and I found these categories and box colours
(colors for you US manglers of the Queen's English!)

•    Classics of Symphony and Sonata       Black

    Grand Opera                           Light Maroon

    Frederic Chopin                       Black

    Richard Wagner                        Purple (that's appropriate!)

    Modern Masters                        Black

    Salon Music                           Maroon

    No category - lots of these           Maroon

•My wife says that she would put Burgundy wherever I have put Maroon.

All the boxes I looked at say Made in USA.  They are Aeolian Co.
rolls.  They all have gold printing and are in boxes with false
bottoms, so that all rolls are the same height on the shelf.

As far as I know, PL rolls are just Metrostyle-Themodist rolls in a
fancy box, with a fancy leader.  Maybe they were produced with an
appealing packaging to tempt people to buy them as gifts.  Most of the
ones that I have are in good shape, which indicates that either the
purchasers really cared for their rolls, or that the roll was a gift to
a family member who was less than enthusiastic about pedalling
classical music.  I'm always pleased to find them, although I wish 9 of
them weren't salon music by Ethelbert Nevin!

The roll described by Paul Johnson isn't a PL roll.  It's a World's
Music or Audiographic roll.  These are rather higher-class rolls, with
lots of musicological information printed along the roll.  I believe
that they are Duo-Art Audiographic rolls without the Duo-Art coding,
but I'm sure that one of our UK members knows more about this.

Some of these rolls come in the same beautiful dark maroon (burgundy?)
boxes with gold printing as do D-A Audiographic rolls.  Others come in
black boxes with bright yellow World's Music labels with a map of the
world thereon.  The rolls themselves all look the same.

It takes quite a bit of pedalling to get to the start of the music on
one of these rolls, because there is a wealth of printed information
about the composer and the music, and also the committee who selected
the rolls, that is supposed to be read first.  Some of the rolls,
intended as instruction rolls for children, check out whether you have
done your reading properly, because right at the end, you come across a
set of questions!  Fortunately there isn't a special mechanism that
locks the reroll until they are answered properly.  These particular
rolls also often have tiny single perforations at intervals along the
extreme right hand edge.  These perfs mark the beginning of each bar of
the music.  It was possible to buy an attachment for your player that
was actuated by these perfs and that made a light flash.  This was
supposed to improve the instructional value of the roll by indicating
each bar to a class of children.

I have heard that the Aeolian Co. in the UK lost a lot of money over
Audiographic rolls and that they never recovered the costs of a very
expensive printing press they had to purchase to print all the various
markings on the rolls.  Again, how about enlightening us, UK
subscribers?

They are very classy rolls.  It's a pity that on many of them the gold
roll-box printing is so faded that it is illegible.  I suppose the
metal content in the ink has oxidised.  I just wonder if some reducing
agent sprayed or wiped over the box might restore it.

John Phillips.