During one of my US trips I picked up a very large 12-tune roll which
had no box and bore no label.  It is standard piano roll width and the
perforations are compatible with my 65-note player, at first I thought
it was an A-roll or a nickelodeon roll of some sort but now I am not so
sure, because:

1.  It is not a production copy because throughout its length there are
some very obvious corrections;

2.  Apart from the usual sustaining perforations there is no coding at
all along the left hand edge;

3.  There are just two rows of coding along the right hand edge;

4.  Some obvious errors have not been corrected;

5.  I suspect that some, if not all of the arrangements are conversions
from 88-note rolls because sometimes the right-hand melody line appears
to go off the scale;

6.  Some of the perforations are rather ragged.

The paper is dark brown and is either of very poor quality or the
roll has been played non-stop for decades.  My ear tells me that the
arrangements are almost certainly by J. Lawrence Cook, but the standard
of perforation is abysmal (the most evident shortcoming is that all the
notes of a chord do not arrive at the tracker bar at exactly the same
moment).

I have heard that Cook did go into the perforating business himself for
a while -- could this roll be one of his failed experiments? Here's the
tune list :

  No not much/Why do fools fall in love/Avalon/Lisbon Antigua/
  Poor people of Paris/Paper moon/Memories are made of this/
  Basin St. blues/Jazz me blues/St. James Infirmary/Lovesick blues/
  Sugar blues.

Does anybody know what this roll might be?

John Farrell
stridepiano@email.msn.com