Dear MMDs,  Who ever dreamed of more than 1500 postcards about large
organs and barrel organ players, most of them dating before 1940?
Depicting, often with a lot of humour, barrel organ players as funny
characters, with various animals (monkeys, rabbits, dogs, cats,...),
or simply as picturesque street musicians?

All these cards will be offered at auction in the large spring auction
of automatas, mechanical music instruments, and phonographs (more than
350 items) that will take place in Chartres (1 hour from Paris,
France), on Sunday, May 23d.  (At least two specialized auctions each
year, for more than 30 years now).  The catalogue will be posted on the
MMD web pages (see at the end of this posting) within a few days.

Amidst the many interesting items, you will notice:

- All these postcards about mechanical music and phonographs, of course,
coming from the collection of the late Claude P. Marchal, who in 1976
established the French association of collectors (AAIMM, more than 600
members and a good quarterly journal), being its first president.  These
postal cards will be sold in more than 60 different lots, arising from
a few scores of euros to several hundred euros;

- many fine automatas by Decamps, Lambert, Roullet-Decamps, Vichy
(a fine black banjo-player), etc.;

- good cylinder (amidst them two by Ducommun-Girod) and disc musical
boxes, good snuffboxes (one F. Nicole, and another with stacked teeth
movement in a nave-shaped burrwood tabatiere), musical picture-clocks,
and many musical novelties;

- large organs, three good barrel pianos (one Spanish manivelle
"Organillo"), many organettes, etc.;

- about 100 lots of phonographs and records;

- gambling and arcade machines.

- good and various documentation (books in English, German and French),
about automatas, organs, mechanical music and phonographs.

The illustrated catalogue (in French, the English version is only on
the web site) is now being printed and will be very soon on its way to
the subscribers.  The price is 8 euros for one catalogue, or 20 euros
for 4 catalogues for 2 years.  All inquiries should be directed to

  Galerie de Chartres
  Me Jean-Pierre Lelievre - Pascal Maiche - Alain Paris
  Commissaires-priseurs associes
  10, rue Claude Bernard - ZA du Coudray BP 70129 - 28003 Chartres Cedex
  Tel.*:  +33 (0) 2 37 88 28 28
  Fax *: + 33 (0) 2 37 88 28 20
  E-mail: chartres@galeriedechartres.com
  (* Do not dial the first (0) if you are outside France).

This event is announced well in advance on the agenda of the web site
http://www.musicamecanica.org/

The complete catalogue will be posted in English and French, thanks to
Robbie Rhodes, Jody Kravitz and Joyce Brite, on the MMD web site at
http://mmd.foxtail.com/Auctions/  (The complete results of the auction
will be posted there too, and you may look at the catalogues of the
previous auctions since Dec. 1998.)

Last but not the least -- for those interested in dolls, there is a
large specialized auction (and a special catalogue in French) on
Saturday May 22d, with several hundred lots.

With best regards,

Philippe Rouille (Paris, France)
http://www.musicamecanica.org/