> Who has the largest roll collections around the world?  Do you know
> of any large repository of music rolls of any kind?

I started trying to do a database of mine and chickened out at 5,000
entries. Enough to act as wife-preventant, anyway (I'm thinking of an
earlier post by Terry Smythe where he got the installation order the
wrong way round, with the wife first).

A famous English collector who died about a year ago was Benet Meakin,
who had about the best fund of stories about the UK end of Aeolian Co
I've heard, after Gordon Iles of Artona Music Rolls. His grandfather
had had an Aeolian pipe organ from new and the family had a pretty
plush mansion jampacked with pneumatic and musical goodies. His own
house was ringed by defunct removal vans sunk axle-deep into the ground
and bulging with pianos. In 1969 he came by a new but abortive motor
museum building in Sussex and managed to tow all the vans there,
filling it right through with pianos, organ parts and rolls. Around
1972 I remember walking through counting: there were 208 pianos, about
fifty of them rare varieties of reproducing grand stood on their sides.
But only two or three really worked well: he was always working on one
and the theory was that he would eventually get round to doing the lot.
Frankly I was only too grateful for the folklore he lavished on
visitors to cavil. At least the instruments were under cover and out of
the hands of well-meaning vandals. He had a quite enormous archive of
original sales material which included a very distinctive presentation
by Bechstein when, pushed to the bread-line by the Depression, they
finally accepted players and offered the Bechstein with the Green Welte
system. (There are some of these in Australia.)

Oh yes, the rolls. He was obsessed with rare types of roll and took the
view that the general public were not to be trusted with the more
valuable varieties, so would buy up anything remotely worth getting
that appeared in "The Exchange & Mart" - a secondhand sales-and-swap
weekly that always had interesting things in its "player pianos"
section and is still going strong. When you considered that he probably
had 70 or 80 Duo-Art pianos, it felt reasonable that he should amass
say 100 rolls apiece for them: but by 1990 when he moved to
Lincolnshire to get more space, his Duo-Art roll collection alone
amounted to some 17,000. Other rolls, maybe 12,000. By that time he
owed me a number in return for some unusual stuff I had turned up - he
nearly burst a blood vessel when I produced some rare Berlin-series
Choralion Co tutorial rolls - but as he had no index of what he had, he
refused to let anything go. One day it would all be catalogued.

In Lincolnshire the collection was in a large hangar-like building and
to conserve floor space the rolls were stacked in a cubical block up to
the roof. A double extension ladder was needed to get to the top of
this and cataloguing was of course out of the question. So that's how
things stayed until he had a stroke in late 1995.

His sons are the executors - they could scarcely not know about players
- and while the pianos have been quietly flowing out, I believe they
have not disposed of the roll collection yet. There's a danger of
depressing the market !

Dan Wilson