Larry Greenfield asked about Jewish player piano rolls.  I answered him
privately, but recent postings lead me to answer publicly as well.  My
wife Ginny will probably clobber me for letting the cat out of the bag
early -- we will eventually add Foreign Language rolls to our Rollo-
graphy.  Sometime.  In the meanwhile we are accumulating data.  (This
is a blatant request for any information available, not limited to QRS.)

We haven't sorted the data yet, but I estimate that QRS listed several
hundred Jewish rolls, starting in the late 'teens.  Most of them appear
to be Yiddish word rolls, mostly secular.

It is surprising how many different languages were represented.  Most
using non-Roman characters were transliterated into Roman characters,
although at least the Greek rolls used the Greek alphabet.  Apropos of
not much, I wonder if the few Armenian rolls used the unique Armenian
alphabet.

Bob Billings

 [ I think QRS used two methods of printing words on the rolls: (1) a
 [ stencil-belt of stiff cardboard, and (2) rubber type mounted to a
 [ linen belt or a huge drum!  Since the stencil puncher probably had
 [ only the Roman alphabet, other character sets like Greek or Hebraic
 [ would have been printed with the rubber type, which was cast by a
 [ local printing shop.  -- Robbie