Replicating Roll Labels
By John Phillips
As has Dean Randall, I've put in a lot of time making replacement piano roll labels. At present I can reproduce:
* Four different sizes of Universal Roll labels, the ones with a border of alternate square flowers and rectangular bundles of some sort of vegetation (woven reeds?). Black print on green paper
* Four different sizes of Aeolian Themodist-Metrostyle labels. Well, actually there are eight choices here, because in the UK some labels had the Orchestrelle Co. label on them and some had the Aeolian Co. logo. The Themodist-Metrostyle rolls made in the US had a different, rather more florid Aeolian Co. logo and I haven't attempted to copy that yet, as most of my rolls originated in the UK. Black and red print on green paper.
* Several sizes of Full Scale Accentuated labels. These are easy, just a few black lines and some printing on green paper.
* World's Music labels, both for the top and ends of the box. Cleaning up scanned copies of these took forever. They have one intentional modification from the originals; Tasmania is now on their world maps, all three pixels of it! As far as I know there is only one size of these -- I hope. Black print on bright yellow paper.
* A couple of sizes of Broadwood labels. These were actually cut by Aeolian in the UK, but were sold by Broadwoods as their own rolls. Black print on blue paper.
* An only half-satisfactory attempt at a Hupfeld label. These labels originally were printed on glossy pale yellow paper with an extremely faint engraving as background. I've never been able to make out what it was. I think it's someone playing a small harp but I'm very unsure. Does anybody know? I've ignored the picture and done a label with black print on cream paper.
* One size (the largest I think) of an Angelus Artistyle label. On looking closely at my roll collection, I've discovered that there are many different Artistyle label types, as has Dean with his Ampicos. This is a never-ending project. Black and green print on grey paper.
These labels were all constructed on a Macintosh computer using the Canvas graphics program. Although they look pretty convincing I don't claim that they are exact replicas. Deciding what fonts to use was indeed a problem. In the end I used New Century Schoolbook where the original had a serif font and Helvetica where a sans-serif font was called for. I too would be glad to know what the original fonts were and whether computer equivalents exist.
About 18 months ago I bought a floppy disk full of scanned roll labels from a company in the US. When I looked at them I was disappointed. They were just scanned in black and white and no attempt had been made to clean them up. I guess one could regard them as a set of starting points.
I'm willing to share my label designs.
John Phillips
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(Message sent Tue 18 Feb 1997, 23:51:18 GMT, from time zone GMT+1100.) |
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