Greetings, all!  Rollin Smith's epic book, "The Aeolian Pipe Organ
and its Music," is a superb work covering the history of the Aeolian
Company, its pipe organs, and its Duo-Art Player.  It is published by
The Organ Historical Society, P. O. Box 26811, Richmond, VA 23261;
price is $39.00 plus $6.50 for shipping via UPS.

Its 533 pages also discuss many of the famous individuals who owned
these automatic instruments, the artists who made rolls for the Aeolian
Duo-Art, and the music they recorded.  The many pictures of the spec-
tacular cases which housed the famous clients' instruments are alone
worth the price of the book.  In my 32 years of interest in automatic
musical instruments, "The Aeolian Pipe Organ and its Music" is unique
in its scholarly treatment of this company's product and related
automatic music.

The Organ Historical Society's current catalog also has a number of
entries of more than passing interest to automatic pipe organ aficion-
ados.  For example, they offer a video entitled "E. M. Skinner's Home
Movies."

Ernest M. Skinner's firm built pipe organs with exceptional romantic/
orchestral voices, which fell out of favor in the l950s (while Skinner
was still alive!) and are now finally coming to be recognized as
historical instruments.

Skinner's full-automatic pipe organ rolls were among the first to use
multiplexing (using a particular tracker-bar hole for more than one
function depending upon other, associated perforations' settings) and
his semi-automatic pipe organ rolls in a later renaissance were the
foundation for the Aeolian-Hammond Player (Duo-Art) Organs built by
Aeolian-Skinner from 1938.

The Organ Historical Society catalog also has a list of videos on
organ building, some of which have relevance for builders of automatic
pipe organs, including military band organs.

Bob Baker