Classic Mode

Presto

Issue: 1920 1747

PRESTO
PRESTO
PUBLISHED EVERY THURSDAY AT 407 SOUTH DEAR-
BORN STREET, OLD COLONY BUILDING, CHICAGO, ILL.
A. DANIELL and FRANK D. ABBOTT
Editors
Telephones: Chicago Tel. Co., Harrison 234; Auto. Tel. Co., Automatic 61-703.
Private Phones to all Departments. Cable Address (Commercial Cable Co.'s Code)
"PRESTO," Chicago.
*nir<»r«(j as second-class matter Jan. 29, 1896, at the Post Office, Chicago. Illinois
•*
under Act of March 3, 1S79.
Subscription, $2 a year; 6 months, $1; Foreign, $4. Payable in advance. No «xtm
«ms«.rjje m TJ, 8. possessions, Canada. Cuba and Mexico
Address all communications for the editorial or business departments to PRESTO
PUBLISHING CO., Chicago, III.
Advertising Ratesi-^Three dollars per inch (13 ems pica) for single insortirai&
Six dollars per inch per month, less twenty-five per cent on yearly contracts. T h i
Presto does not sell its editorial space. Payment is not accepted for articles of de-
scriptive character or other matter appearing in the news columns. Business not ces
will be indicated by the word "advertisement" in accordance with the Act of August
24. 1912.
Rates for advertising in the Tear Book issue and Export Supplements of The
Presto will be made known upon application. The Presto Year Book and Export
issues have the most extensive circulation of any periodicals devoted to the musical!
Instrument trades and industries in all parts of the world, and reach completely and
effectually all the houses handling musical instruments of both the Eastern and West-
ern hemispheres.
The Presto Buyeis' Guide Is the only reliable index to the American Musical
instruments; it analyzes all Pianos and Player-Pianos, gives accurate estimates tb«nr values and contains a directory of their manufacturers.
-3 Ktems of news, photographs and other matter of general interest to the muss*
trades are invited and when accepted will be paid for. Address all communications <*•
presto Publishing Co., Chicago, III.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 15, 1920.
TO CORRESPONDENTS.
PRESTO IS ALWAYS GLAD TO RECEIVE NEWS OF THE
TRADE—ALL KINDS OF NEWS EXCEPT PERSONAL SLANDER
AND STORIES OF PETTY MISDEEDS BY INDIVIDUALS. PRESTO
WILL PRINT THE NAMES OF CORRESPONDENTS WHO SEND IN
"GOOD STUFF" OR ARE ON THE REGULAR STAFF. DON'T SEND
ANY PRETTY SKETCHES, LITERARY ARTICLES OR "PEN-PIC-
TURES." JUST PLAIN NEWS ABOUT THE TRADE—NOT ABOUT
CONCERTS OR AMATEUR MUSICAL ENTERTAINMENTS, BUT
ABOUT THE MEN WHO MAKE MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS AND
THOSE WHO SELL THEM. REPORTS OF NEW STORES AND
THE MEN WHO MAKE RECORDS AS SALESMEN ARE GOOD. OF-
TEN THE PIANO SALESMEN ARE THE BEST CORRESPONDENTS
BECAUSE THEY KNOW WHAT THEY LIKE TO READ AND HAVE
THE OPPORTUNITIES FOR FINDING OUT WHAT IS "DOING" IN
THE TRADE IN THEIR VICINITY. SEND IN THE N E W S -
ALL YOU CAN GET OF IT—ESPECIALLY ABOUT YOUR OWN
BUSINESS.
THE SIZE OF IT
There is always a temptation to indulge in reminiscence at the
beginning of a New Year. So many things have happened since the
late old year began. So many more things happened in all of the
years that range themselves in memory before that. And the oppor-
tunities of contrast are so many, and perhaps equally fruitful of the
good results of experience. But Presto is one of the business publica-
tions that tries to keep the cork pretty tight in the flask of reminis-
cence.
It is now something like thirty-three years since the first Presto
Year Book Issue made its appearance. It was put forth at Christmas
time and, of course, it carried the regulation holly wreaths and other
symbols of the season. And Presto Year Books kept coming, every
year, until in the middle of the nineties the annual book of the music
trade was the biggest magazine ever produced in connection with
pianos and other things of more or less sweet sound.
Since then, other trade papers have also put forth heavy, fat and
handsome Holiday Numbers and Christmas Numbers. And they have
added to the gaiety of the nation, and carried enough special adver-
tising to pay the printers. Without doubt, also, they have paid their
advertisers.
But our fine and fancy special trade paper issues have not
grasped the idea as originally illustrated by Presto. Pretty pictures
and fine printing may be found in a hundred publications on every
newsstand. The trade paper cannot compete with them. But none of
those pretty publications sets forth anything of special value to the
men who make and sell musical instruments—that is, nothing that
can help along the results of their business. Here is where, we believe
and hope, Presto Year Book Issue was as different as it was more
within reason.
One of the features of last week's issue of Presto was the "Suc-
cessful Styles of the Year" section. In that feature was the real
January 15, 1920.
basis of the issue—that and the succinct review of the twelve months
recently ended. And it needs no words to tell why the two features
are of practical value to the industry and trade. The Successful Styles
this time were not as full or diversified as in some earlier issues. That
was partly because the manufacturers have not been turning out so
many new styles, partly because they have been so engrossed in trying
to supply the demand; partly because some of them got the notion
that Presto wanted only styles of its advertisers, and so did not re-
spond to the invitation to contribute. But this paper is not so narrow
as the latter suggestion would imply.
The purpose of the Successful Styles feature is to help the deal-
ers; to afford a means of comparison and contrast not to be found
anywhere else. Of course the more handsome case designs shown for
tha purpose the more valuable the feature. However, there were
enough for the purpose and more of them would have added to the
bulk of the paper—not a desirable result.
The last sentence reminds us that some Presto Year Book issues,
in times past, were the largest trade papers ever produced. They, in
some instances, were so bulky as to make the biggest and fattest of
recent holiday numbers seem small. And one cf the real efforts in
preparing this issue of Presto has been to keep the size within com-
fortable proportions. If we could squeeze all of the features, and
other timely matter, into the regular 32 pages that would have been
done. However, next year's Presto Year Book's issue may put forth
a paper consisting of at least 300 pages. We say it may!
CHANGING PLACES
While the turning-back season is at its full, take a look behind
at the changed places of some one-time prominent old piano concerns
and some newer ones. There are old names, almost forgotten today,
which were once on every piano man's lips and to be seen in the
newspapers when great things in music were under discussion. And
there are comparatively new names in the piano world that are so
conspicuous that no one could miss them in any consideration of
the industry or trade.
What has brought about the near-extinction of the piano names
once so great? What has given to the newer names so much power
and virility?
Of course, when a great man in any department of effort closes
his book of life, the story, so far as his individual initiative goes, is
done. If what he has accomplished is to persist it must be because
there are inheritors of his genius and his material assets, possessed of
ambition and abilities not unlike his own. If there are no such suc-
cessors, the name must gradually sink into forgetfulness, and the
industrial towers of the great life go to decay.
Apply that to some of the one-time powerful piano names and
industries. We, who know and keep track of the progressive news of
the piano, and who must also note the retrogression of seme of the
others, can tell in a sentence the names of both kinds. And a few of
the industries that were built by brainy men, and are now dying
because of small controls, present remarkable contrasts. It would be
of curious interest could some Sir Oliver Lodge get out the myste-
rious apparatus by which the hearts and souls of the dead are said to
throb in intelligent accord with the living, and get in touch with some
of the piano makers of the past. There are great piano names, of
years gone, that are now rapidly losing their lustre and fading even
from the memory of old-timers. We could print nearly a column of
them, and they would be significant of the folly of little men in big
places.
And in another column we could print the names of younger men
who are carrying forward the names they have inherited, in a way
to insure a greater future than anything in the past. It is young men
of the latter kind that have brought the estimated values of good
piano names from tens of thousands to full millions of dollars. An
illustration of the latter estimate appeared in a recent issue of this
paper. And to give special emphasis to this matter of a broad-gauge
administration of an old piano left by its founder to the younger gen-
eration, it would be easy to turn to New York and point to one of
several that have grown from comparatively small things to giant
proportions embracing nearly every branch of manufacture from
smallest supplies to completed instrument.
It would be folly, of course, for a trade paper to draw any such
invidious comparisons. It would be almost as needless to emphasize
the subject by pointing to the highest peaks of efficiency in New
York, as to the lowest specimen of inefficiency in Chicago. But it
could be done. It could be shown that in New York there is a piano
industry so great, so adroitly and liberally conducted, that it reaches
out to the ends of the world in disposing of the product of a score of
factories. And it could be shown, by way of contrast, that in Chicago
Enhanced content © 2008-2009 and presented by MBSI - The Musical Box Society International (www.mbsi.org) and the International Arcade Museum (www.arcade-museum.com).
All Rights Reserved. Digitized from the archives of the MBSI with support from NAMM - The International Music Products Association (www.namm.org).
Additional enhancement, optimization, and distribution by the International Arcade Museum. An extensive collection of Presto can be found online at http://www.arcade-museum.com/library/
PHCfifTO
January 15, 1920.
there is an industry, once superlatively great, at least commercially,
which has dried up under inadequate control until it is hardly a good
shadow of its former multi-millionaire self.
This year will try out both kinds of piano concerns. More steam,
better administration and wider vision, will this year guide and direct
the American piano as never before. And at the end we shall have a
new and enlarged vision of the workings of the ancient and honorable
law of the "survival of the fittest."
THE NEW PIED PIPER
PIANO HISTORY MAKERS
We believe that most men in this trade and industry found
interest in the interviews with famous piano men in last week's
issue of Presto. To every retailer of pianos there is some one manu-
facturer, or perhaps more than one, whose personalities have vastly
more than common interest. The piano industry has been pretty well
built up by men of especially strong personal attributes. From the
day' when John Jacob Astor, the first, opened his little piano,store on
lower Broadway, New York, to this day the mind easily reverts to
the great figures in the industry. There comes at once the bright
face of Jonas Chickering of whom a quaint picture was drawn by
Henry Phillips, the English baritone, during that singer's American
tour in 1843. It is worth repeating here. ' ' A>
"I had conceived Mr. Chickering to be a tall, stout man," said the
English artist, "somewhat proud and austere; good hearted, but with
an odd way of showing it—-seeming at times as if he were conferring
a favor on you by inviting you to his house, but begging you would
make yourself as much at home as the stateliness of the place, his
family's superiority, and his large fortune, would permit. Judge of
my astonishment when a little thin person walked into the room,
with a modest, almost bashful, cast of features, who shook me by the
hand as if he had known me all his life, whose hard palm bore the
evidence of labor, and whose dress might have been brushed to
advantage."
And that was the "father of the American piano." It is a grateful
picture of one of the immortals in the history of the piano. And, fol-
lowing in the long line of his successors in the industry, we catch
glimpses of other piano makers of Boston. There is Henry F. Miller,
the first, at his own piano, playing like an artist; and Jas. A. Vose
and C. C. Briggs, and J. W. Brackett—the original pedal-piano maker
—and Geo. M. Guild, inventor and impractical genius; and John Mc-
Tammany, with his first player-piano experimentations.
New York piano history is crowded with memorable figures. The
elder Fischer and his four stalwart sons; the succession of Bacons;
the Steinways from Henry, in 1857, to William and finally Charles H.
Steinway whose going is so recent that he seems still to be here.
And George Steck, serious-minded and thorough; Albert Weber,
small, dark-skinned and volatile; the Haines Brothers, of boundless
ambition; the Hazeltons, and others whose heirs follow over and join
the past with the present. No less has the West contributed some
great piano men, and large memories, from Julius Bauer, W. W T .
Kimball, the Cables, to the younger men now hard at it. So, too, with
Cincinnati and other piano points whose industries still contribute
their share.
It is to such men as are in a sense brought back to us in the
interviews recalled last week, that we owe existing advanced condi-
tions in the American piano industry. And, of course, conditions in
AND THEY NKVER CAME BACK.
the retail trade are equally, or more, to be measured by what the
manufacturers have done and are still doing.
If there is any man who is posted on events in the piano industry
Mr. R. S. Howard of the New York industry that bears his name is
all of that. That's why we suspect one of the trade papers has been
printing fake interviews with Mr. Howard and making him say things
that are not so. F'rinstance, the old Boston house of Hallett & Cums-
ton didn't start full-page trade paper advertising, nor did the late Marc
A. Blumenberg "start" the Courier. Don't let's get trade paper history
as badly mixed as an ordinary obituary column.
*
The death of Thomas F. Scanlan, one-time king of popular piano
production, recalls many incidents in the history of the industry. Mr.
Scanlan was at one time the Joseph P. Hale of Boston, and his factory
was the biggest in the industry. He would have been a multi-mil-
lionaire had he not taken to "kiting" notes with a big Texas piano
house and fallen short in his dates. His New England piano was long
a shining mark in the popular trade.
* * *
There is good news for some dealers in this issue of Presto. You
will glimpse it with gladness on page 17. "We have 100 straight
pianos ready for shipment!" Isn't that a cry of "water" in the desert?
And the oasis is in sight, and it's real.
dered from Chicago to Canada; has heard the coy-
ottes yelp in the night, and shuddered at the bones
of the buffalo piled high on the wind-cursed plains
of Saskatchewan. It has been ferried across the
South Saskatchewan river by a French-Canadian
and has shivered in the weather of fifty below zero.
It has warmed the hearts of the lonely Saskatche-
But Letter From Denver Only Suggests a Ful- wan
homesteader and caused music to ring in his
ler Story That Should Prove
heart. It has encouraged me when everything was
going wrong; frost bitten crops and droughts.
Interesting.
The piano has done all this and more; it has much
The following extract from a letter by a retail
to tell. Carried across the badger burrowed trails
customer of the Smith, Barnes & Strohber Co., Chi- by wagon seventy-five miles in Canada; stuck in the
cago, is not only a tribute to a Smith & Barnes Sand Hills; balked at by the tired horses in the al-
piano's durability under trying circumstances but is kali sloughs of that country. Yet in all this, it has re-
also a heart-felt expression of human feeling the tained its tone and excellent fine touch. There is
piano engendered. The letter suggests a piano story nothing that adds so much to a home as a piano.
interesting enough to be classed with trade classics.
This one has caused me tears of anguish, hours of
It is the adventures of a Smith & Barnes piano in a worry, and days of pleasure. Some day I'll try to
thrilling trip from a comfortable Chicago residence
give you a history of this instrument—it is worth
to a sod shanty thirty-five miles from a railroad in reading. Mixes the city of Chicago up with the cold
Western Canada:
pioneer life of Saskatchewan, and brings the rough-
The piano is a "hum-dinger" (pardon slang) and ness of the frontier into touch with the mad restless
it would have many a story to tell. Sometimes I spirit of Civilization as developed in Chicago. From
have thought it could not look me in the face be- a modern house in Wellington court to a sod shanty
cause of the worry it has caused me. It has wan- thirty-five miles from a railroad in western Canada.
EXPERIENCES OF A
SMITH & BARNES PIANO
* -! ;
NAMES SUBMITTED BY
NOMINATING COMMITTEE
A. M. Wright and Charles Jacob Nominated for
Secretary and Treasurer of N. P. M. A. of A.
In accordance with Article X of the by-laws of
the National Piano Manufacturers' Association of
America, the nominating committee, composed of
Warren C. Whitney, Geo. F. Blake and Sidney N.
Mayer, presents the following names:
For Secretary—A. M. Wright of Boston.
For Treasurer—Charles Jacob of New York.
For Membership Committee—William B. Will-
iams, New York; A. A. Mahan, Fort Wayne, Ind.;
Ava W. Poole, Boston; A. Dalrymple, New York;
Hobart M. Cable, La Porte, Ind.
The other officers and committees are nominated
at the annual meeting.
E. W. Furbush, of Chicago, traveler for the Had-
dorff Piano Company, spent Monday and Tuesday
of this week at the factory headquarters in Rock-
ford, 111.
Enhanced content © 2008-2009 and presented by MBSI - The Musical Box Society International (www.mbsi.org) and the International Arcade Museum (www.arcade-museum.com).
All Rights Reserved. Digitized from the archives of the MBSI with support from NAMM - The International Music Products Association (www.namm.org).
Additional enhancement, optimization, and distribution by the International Arcade Museum. An extensive collection of Presto can be found online at http://www.arcade-museum.com/library/

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