The ANTIQUE PHONOGRAPH MONTHLY, Allen Koenigsberg, Brooklyn, NY - First published in 1973 with two main goals: To provide an advertising medium to collectors and dealers and to publish pictures, articles, reviews and accurate information for collectors, libraries, and historical societies." APM is currently available on the Internet Archive. Allen Koenigsberg is known to Friends of the Phonograph and Phonographians as the Sherlock Holmes of phonograph related mysteries.

 

 

The Antique Phonograph Society - A world wide society that encourages, promotes, publishes and presents research on the history of sound recording and reproduction, including the machines that create and preserve these wonderful voices and sounds.

 

Archeophone Home Page - Grammy-winning label reissues acoustic era recording (the 1890s through 1925), rescuing, preserving and contextualizing the world's oldest records.

 

The Internet Archive @ Archive.org - a non-profit library of books, music, significant phonograph related resources such as The Talking Machine World, The Phonoscope, The Phonogram, Edison Phonograph Monthly and much more.

 

 

Belfer Library - Syracuse University Libraries - Listen to the digital files supplied by the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, which may be used for scholarly, research, or educational purposes of a non-commercial nature.

Also see The Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive for more details about collection of sound recordings and related items.

 

 

 

Bibliography of Works on Thomas A. Edison - Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences - The Thomas A. Edison Papers

 

 

Bless Them All: The Songs of Fred Godfrey - A nicely created website by Barry Norris, the grandson of Fred Godfrey

 

 

Canadian Antique Phonograph Society - Interests range across all aspects of sound recording and its history: phonographs and gramophones, all types of sound recordings of historic importance, ephemera and related memorabilia. There is particular emphasis placed on the history of recorded sound in Canada.

 

 

CHARM - A Brief History of Early Recording, Discography, Sound Files, Research Projects, Studies, Analyzing Recordings

 

 

The City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society (CLPGS) - The oldest such society in the world who also publish their official journal "For the Record."

 

 

Comedy on Vinyl - Episodes - Comedy on Vinyl is a podcast created by writer/actor Jason Klamm in which he discusses influential and important comedy albums with the week’s guests. It's another reminder that the Stage of the World, including comedy, had a period in time when buying and listening to the record was a ticket to front-row comedy.

 

 

Crank Up the Phonograph - Who We Are and Where We Came From in Early Sound Recordings by Eric Byron

Crank Up the Phonograph website

 

Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) - a database of master recordings made by American record companies during the 78rpm era. It is part of the American Discography Project (ADP)—an initiative of the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Packard Humanities Institute that is edited by a team of researchers based at the UCSB Library. The ADP is also a partner with the Library of Congress National Jukebox project and provides most of the cataloging data used in the Jukebox.

 

Disquaires de Paris - Using an interactive map, this website pays tribute to the record dealers and venders of phonograph cylinders, who allowed Parisians to discover recorded sound as early as the end of the 19th century.

Dust to Digital - By combining research with images, audio and videos, Dust-to-Digital creates access to hard-to-find music by producing high-quality books, box sets, CDs, DVDs and vinyl records. In 2012, Lance and April Ledbetter (founders of Dust to Digital) started a non-profit organization Music Memory to ensure the sounds and recordings of our past would be preserved.

Edison muckers - A Blog for Everything Edison, Everyday

 

 

Excavated Shellac - A website dedicated to 78rpm recordings of folkloric and vernacular music from around the world.

 

First Sounds - Making humanity's earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time.

 

 

For the record: Emil Berliner and the gramophone - A virtual exhibition by the Museumsstiftung Post und Telekommunikation.

 

 

The Great 78 Project - 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century on Internet Archive

 

 

Griffonage-Dot-Com - Patrick Feaster's Blog - Ongoing explorations in historical media, documents, inscriptions, et cetera - Be sure to also check-out Feaster's Published Elsewhere link

 

 

HathiTrust - A partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.

 

 

The Henry Ford Collection of Phonographs

 

 

History - The North American Phonograph Company - The Library of Congress

 

 

How the Phonograph Changed Music Forever by Clive Thompson - January 2016 - Edison’s invention redefined the entire industry - article courtesy of Smithsonian Magazine

 

 

The Internet Museum of Flexi / Cardboard / Oddity Records - Cereal box records, promo, novelty and assorted plastic and paper records are on view and playable.

 

Library of Congress National Jukebox - Historical Recordings from the Library of Congress

 

 

Library of Historical Audio Recordings at i78s.org - Historical Recordings from the collection of David Giovannoni with over 36,000 sound recordings. Great resource for scholarship and research. User registration required.

 

 

Little Wonder Records and Bubble Books - Merle Sprinzen's website with a "mission to bring together everything that known about Little Wonder Records and their offshoots, including Bubble Books...and give them their historical due"

 

Mainspring Press - The Leader in Forensic Discography Since 1999 - 78 RECORDS, CYLINDER RECORDS & VINTAGE PHONOGRAPHS Information and Resources for Historic-Sound Enthusiasts -

 

Media History Digital Library - A free online resource, featuring millions of pages of books and magazines from the histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound.

 

Phonorama - Julien Anton's excellent site dedicated to the cylinder phonograph and its inventors.

 

 

Phonostalgia - Research and articles by Ryan Barna regarding talent, business, and technology of the acoustic recording era.

 

 

ProjectMuse - Project MUSE Mission Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. ©2023 Project MUSE. Produced by Johns Hopkins University Press in collaboration with The Sheridan Libraries.

 

 

Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 by William Howland Kenney, Oxford University Press, © 1999 by William Howland Kenney

 

Recording Pioneers - Sound Recorders, i.e., the recording engineers who made sound recordings

 

 

78 RPM Club - The 78 rpm Club "collects and preserves everything concerning the fragile sound carriers."

 

 

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings - Shop, enjoy playlists and listen to excerpts of CD and Vinyl Recordings for sale

 

 

Visit Sound Beat for a daily, 90 second show highlighting the archive of Recorded Sound and Music at the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) at Syracuse University's Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive.

 

 

Sound of the Hound - This blog is dedicated to the story of how recording came into being and how it conquered the world.

 

Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound - Phonograph Collection

 

Timeline: Recording Music - Part 1 by James Stewart, September 26, 2016 - ©Vermont Public Radio - A brief history of the story of recording.

 

 

Timeline - Recorded Sound Industry - This brief historic time-line illustrates major events in the recorded sound industry, from the birth of the recorded sound in 1857, to the merger of the two recording industry giants Columbia and Victor Records in 2004 under their parent companies Sony and Bertelsmann Music Group while TowerRecords files for bankruptcy.

 

UC Santa Barbara Library - Cylinder Audio Archive - The UCSB Library, with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Grammy Foundation, and donors, has created a digital collection of more than 10,000 cylinder recordings held by the UCSB Library. Recordings are available for streaming.

 

 

The United States Early Radio History - Thomas H. White - Chapter 3 particularly interesting on early use of telephone for opera, news, concerts and the reading of stories.

 

The Victor-Victrola Page - Website dedicated to phonographs made by The Victor Talking Machine Company from 1901 through 1929. Nice timelines and information. If you have a Victor Talking Machine please register it here.

 

 

The Vincent Voice Library - The G. Robert Vincent Voice Library is a collection of over 100,000 hours of spoken word recordings, dating back to 1888. The collection includes the voices of over 500,000 persons from all walks of life.

 

 

Raymond R. Wile Research Library - Archive of primary source documents bequested by Wile estate and available on Internet Archive

 

 

OTHER CREDITS

Several other resources for many years significantly contributed to my enjoyment of phonographs (and these are now available on The Internet Archive)

The TALKING MACHINE REVIEW International, Bournemouth, England

The New Amberola GRAPHIC, published by The New Amberola Phonograph Co., Martin F. Bryan

The EDISON PHONOGRAPH MONTHLY, Volumes 1-14, exactly reproduced by Wendell Moore, January 1976

 

BOOKS

So many books, discographies and well researched articles contribute to documenting and interpretting the history of the phonograph and those bibliographies exist and are maintained in better places than Phonographia.com.

I will, however, call out several titles that I may have referenced in other places of this site but want to mention here as particularly noteworthy.

Columbia Phonograph Companion Volume I - Hazelcorn's Guide to the Columbia Cylinder Graphophone by Howard Hazelcorn, Mulholland Press, ©1999

Edison Cylinder Records, 1889-1912 With an Illustrated History of the Phonograph by Allen Koenigsberg, APM Press, Brooklyn, NY, ©1987

The Papers of Thomas A. Edison Menlo Park: The Early Years April 1876 - December 1877 Volume 3, Edited by Robert A. Rosenberg, Paul B. Israel, Keith A. Nier, and Martha J. King, The Johns Hopkins University Press, ©1994, Rutgers, The State University

The Papers of Thomas A. Edison Research To Development at Menlo Park January 1879 - March 1881 Volume 5, Edited by Paul B. Israel, Louis Carlat, David Hochfelder, and Keith A. Nier, The Johns Hopkins University Press, ©2004, Rutgers, The State University

The Papers of Thomas A. Edison The Wizard of Menlo Park 1878 Volume 4, Edited by Paul B. Israel, Keith A. Nier, and Louis Carlat, The Johns Hopkins University Press, ©1998, Rutgers, The State University

Phonograph Dolls and Toys by Joan & Robin Rolfs, Mulholland Press, ©2004.

The Schiffer Book for Collectors series authored by Timothy C. Fabrizio and George F. Paul, e.g., "The Talking Machine An Illustrated Compendium 1877-1929"; "Gadgets, Gizmos, and Gimmicks," "Discovering Antique Phonographs," "Phonographs with Flair," "Antique Phonograph Advertising," "Accessories and Contractions," and "Phonographica."

Talking Toys of the 20th Century by Kathy and Don Lewis, Collector Books, Paducah, Kentucky, ©1999

Tinfoil Phonographs by René Rondeau, ©2001

The Victor Data Book by Robert W. Baumbach, Mulholland Press, ©2003

 

The scope and quality of this site was significantly dependent on phonograph experts, the above references, resources, archives, societies, discographies, libraries and record collections which may not be identified on this page but in no way diminishes the importance of the publication of other books and articles examining all kinds of phonograph related subjects and themes.