The first place I looked for information on Music Boxes was Amazon. What
a waste of time that was. First it matches you up with 100 titles, most
having to do with Children stories or Fantasy novels that happen to have
the word Music Box in the titles.  Out of that mess there was one book I
could have used, but when I tried to order it, I got an e-mail message
book out of print, unavailable at this time.  Next was Infoseek, I did a
number of searches under infoseek, each time bringing up about 1 million
matches. I generally only look at the first 40 or 50 matches before I
give up and try another key word search. The Internet is a powerful
informational tool, but effective search engines are lacking. Now if I
could do a search on music boxes and get 1 million hits and then narrow
my target with another key word search on only the 1 million already
selected and not the whole net again, I might have gotten somewhere.

After several hours or searching, I did a search on the Author of the
book, Bulleid and got www.usbooks.com/musicbox.html  this listed every
music book ever published (i think a least).

Also to Recoil the information listed in this "The Official Price Guide
to Music Collectibles" was apparently pieced together from auction
information and the accuracy of this book is somewhat inaccurate
according to many. I guess it's better than nothing :) I did go to the
book stores today and looked in several antique book price guides, they
varied from 1 paragraph to 1 page of information on Music Boxes, prices
varied widely from 300 dollar Regina to a 30k Regina. I think I'll take
these prices with a grain of salt, but I still think a accurate price
guide can be written.

 [ Editor's Note:
 [
 [ The problem you had at amazon.com is typical of the kind of problem
 [ you get with an inadequately qualified search using a search engine
 [ with a huge database.  This is why I think there's going to be
 [ a need for good reference librarians for a long time to come.
 [ You can, however, learn to be creative in qualifying your request.
 [ The Amazon search engine is based on Dec's Alta Vista technology.
 [ You can say things like
 [
 [      +Regina
 [
 [ meaning it _must_ have the word Regina and it _must_ be capitalized, or
 [
 [      -children
 [
 [ which means that any text containing the word "children" will be rejected.
 [ Strings can be quoted to mean that the words must be present together
 [
 [      +"music box" -children
 [
 [ would imply that the text must contain "music box" and not contain
 [ "children".  This will help you to not get books about cardboard boxes
 [ or classical music.
 [
 [ The trick here is to be creative in your searches and spend a little
 [ time with the manual.  Not all incorrect hits are bad:  I have a wonderful
 [ book of black and white photographs of steam train locomotives that I
 [ found using their search while researching calliopes....
 [
 [ Jody