Back from a non-vacation trip to Florida, I've been looking through
some week-old installments and notice several items on Joplin.  I will
comment on what is, to me, the most pressing.

To John Tuttle:  If you really have a "first run of Scott Joplin's
Maple Leaf Rag," you have an item of *great* rarity.  Why not describe
it and tell us why you think it is a "first run".

Bill Ryan's comments are valuable, but a few puzzle me:

> ...  There was man named John Stark who gave Joplin $50 for the Maple
> Leaf Rag and a royalty of 1 cent for each copy sold.  Unheard of in
> those days, ...

The contract specifies a 1 cent royalty for each sheet; there is no
mention of any other payment, except for 10 copies of the music.

Though royalty payments to popular music composers were rare, they were
not unheard of.  The Johnson Bros. (James Weldon and Rosamond) had
received a royalty contract from Stern in 1898, and Ernest Hogan by that
time was claiming to have been raking in money from his royalty
contracts.

> ... Here is the point, if you think you have an original Maple Leaf
> Rag, it was printed by the firm named Westover, in Saint Louis, with
> 5000 copies put out.

Westover?  Maybe, but I don't see it printed on the music.  Why is
there interest in who the printer was, anyway?  I know of no informa-
tion indicating that 5,000 copies were printed on the original run.

> ... Stark's ledger five years later shows a total of one million
> copies sold.  Chrysanthemum and The Cascades went through the same ...

If Stark's ledgers for 1904 still exist, I have never seen them.
I have seen later ledgers (owned by Trebor Tichenor), but they don't
contain yearly totals; just totals for individual *credit* sales,
mostly to stores or jobbers.  In analyzing these ledgers, I typed each
entry into a spreadsheet to get totals.

Further, there is no objective evidence that even the Maple Leaf, the
most popular piano rag, sold a million in Joplin's life-time.  I know
what Stark said in his adverts, but that's just hype.  In 1909, Stark's
son told an interviewer that sales of Maple Leaf had just then reached
1/2 million, and publishers are not likely to understate sales.  State-
ments by other Stark family members in later years support this more
modest estimate.

There is no indication in Stark's ledgers or anywhere else that
Chrysanthemum and Cascades were even close to Maple Leaf in sales.

> If you have an original first edition (March 1904) of "The
> Chrysanthemum", printed by the gentleman John Stark, whom I mentioned
> in the other note here, there is a dedication line in fine print near
> the top of the cover, dedicating the piece to Freddie Alexander.  The
> first edition of the rag came out in 3/04, Scott married Freddie in
> 06/04 and removed this dedication after about 500 pieces or so, when
> she passed on, in 09/04 from pneumonia.

I'm pleased that information about Freddie Alexander is getting around,
but: (1) the dedication, though in smaller type than the title, is not
"in fine print"; and, (2) we do not know why the dedication does not
appear on later printings.  This is what I *think* happened:

   The colors of the first printing, green and yellow, provide such
poor contrast, the cover can be read only with great difficulty.  It
is so bad that, to get a satisfactory photograph, I had to shoot in
black-and-white.  I have color slides (that I sometimes use for
lectures on the subject), but they are virtually impossible to read.

   I hypothesize that Stark dumped most of these covers, but used
them for the copyright registration.  (The only place I have seen these
covers is at the Library of  Congress.  I know of no collector who has
ever seen a private copy of this cover.)

   Meanwhile, the text plate for the cover must have been destroyed,
for in re-doing the cover two text errors were introduced:  the
dedication was omitted; and, "An Afro-American Intermezzo" became
"An Afro-Intermezzo".

This is, as I have said, a guess.  But I have seen no information to
indicate that the dedication was removed because of Freddie's early
demise.

Perhaps I'm being picayune, but I think it necessary to head off the
circulation of incorrect information.  Too often, misinformation gains
greater currency than truth.  I would think that the members of this
group, at least, would appreciate my concern.

Ed Berlin

 [ However picayune it may seem, it's important that scholarly research
 [ be distributed; I'm pleased that Ed has chosen to publish in MMD and
 [ thus get the word quickly to the Internet (re-)search engines!
 [ -- Robbie