When Harvey Roehl wrote about the Vestal Press for the Player Piano
Group bulletin, he explained how Larry Givens' "very basic" book,
"Rebuilding the Player Piano," was rather shorter than he'd hoped for,
and how it was printed with large type, large margins and thick paper
to make it book-sized!

Quite rightly, this book was dropped when Art Reblitz's superb opus
came out, and it would be doing nobody coming into the hobby any
favours to offer them Givens instead of Reblitz -- especially as the
Reblitz book remains in print and is available at a most economical
price ($19.11 from Amazon right now).

A problem from the National Book Network of culling of the Vestal
catalogue is withdrawal of the technical leaflets on reproducing pianos
that were omitted from Reblitz on the grounds that it would be repetition
of the information.  Now that the technical leaflets are separated from
the book (and presumably will not be reprinted), it would be nice to
see an expanded "Player Piano Servicing and Rebuilding" incorporating
this information all in one place.  One day, perhaps?

If pressed to choose what to revive from Vestal, I'd concentrate on
their new publications rather than reprints: titles such as
Obenchain's Ampico catalog (okay, it was a reprint in Vestal's issue),
and Givens' "Re-Enacting the Artist", and for the heroically-inclined
publisher some more copies of the superb Welte-Mignon catalogue by
Charles Davis Smith would no doubt find ready homes.

Top of the pile would have to be "Player Piano Treasury" itself,
of course.  However, aren't there still new copies of Bowers'
"Encyclopaedia of Mechanical Music" available from its reprint a few
years back, as documented in MMD at the time?

Where Vestal scored heavily was in their numerous small print-run
offerings -- they would reprint anything likely to sell 100 copies!
Some appear to have been reprinted more than once (I've seen two
utterly different versions of "Piano Tone Building", for instance).

I'm still looking for a copy of McTammany's "Technical History of the
Player", should anyone consider reprinting it.

Julian Dyer