Welcome to Dave Dibley, of the Pianola Shop, 134 Islingword Road,
Brighton, England, who joins the Digest today.

I described the shop in some detail in MMD970818. It's the last of
the Mohicans, a real player-piano shop such as most American towns
still had in the 1960s but very few British towns have had at any
time. Not that there aren't plenty of restorers around, but none of
them have a real showroom you can walk into off the street and try a
number of pianos for sound. This time, apart from a Gotha Steck
upright with an action made unrestorable by an earlier job using
modern glue, a Weber all-electric Duo-Art and a Chickering Ampico
grand, there is a half-rebuilt Marque Ampico upright - I check the
frame casting and yes, no doubt about it, they did have (Dean
Randall, MMD980330, wake up) an acute accent on the E of MARQUE.
Strange !

Time marches on: at the back there is now a desk with a computer, on
which, today, we played the complimentary CD that came this week with
"the Pianola Journal" (Friends of the Pianola Institute, see MMD
resource list), of Percy Grainger playing the Grieg concerto on
Duo-Art (Peter Davis's DA conversion of a Pianola 88n pushup, playing
a Steinway concert grand) with the Collegium Musicum, Copenhagen.
Dave does a kind of mail-order player business in Denmark and
translates the CD booklet notes for me. In his copy of Lotus 123,
available at the press of a button, is every part of a standard UK
Aeolian 88-note upright of the 1920s, ready priced, as though it were
a 1970s Volvo.

Once David was the youngest "lad" under player restorer Mary Belton's
verbal lash, just down the main road in North Road, Brighton, at The
Original Pianola Shop whose faded sign of Chopin still swung in the
wind last time I went that way, 20 years after the shop closed. Then
he did (I think) the "Central School" course in London on piano
rebuilding and like the intense talker he is, let nothing slip by and
became a real 100% player restorer. An agraffe on my Bechstein has
snapped off: he can and does tell me in minute detail the steps that
have to be taken to extract the stump, fit a new agraffe and renew
the strings affected. He even knows the wire gauge without looking it
up.

I am grateful there are people like this, who are carrying players
forward for a new generation. I am not of their exacting standard. I
hope he will be correcting me before long on my memories from the
1940s and 50s of UK player lore. The Digest is genuinely enlarged
with his joining.

Dan Wilson