I've had a little bit to do with museums, archives and stuff I didn't
want to see destroyed.  During the 1920s the British arm of the Aeolian
Co brought out some high-art hand-played "Audiographic" rolls which
were printed throughout their length with instructions for playing and
drawings illustrative of the music contained on them.  My parents
happened to know one of the artists involved, Norman Janes, and around
1969 I wrote to him for his reminiscences.

He remembered the commissions fairly well.  A curiosity of them was
that the Aeolian Co sent him one each of the rolls that contained his
work -- he didn't have a player-piano with which to hear them, stuck
them in a wardrobe and eventually burnt them all around 1945 !

I summarised all this for the Player-Piano Group Bulletin, but Norman
Janes' letter struck me as a bit of player history I was the wrong sort
of person to have control of, so I went to see Albert Littler who was
at that time the Archivist of the PPG.  I was somewhat horrified to
find that, so far from having a dedicated fireproof area to house the
collection, he had been lumbered with it in lieu of anyone else prepared
to give the space, and the material merely occupied some of the shelves
in his living-room.  Nor did it seem to be indexed at all tightly.
Nonetheless, even this was preferable to the chaotic mountains of paper
in my own house, so I left the letter with him and I only hope it's
still in the collection.

Since then I have been doing research in a valuable railway collection
which has been left to a county archive, and here the situation is
totally different.  Not only is there a dedicated fireproofed building,
the papers are boxed, everything is indexed and the temperature is kept
down to 50 deg. F to help preserve the paper.  I wouldn't now leave
valuable material to any other kind of archive.  I doubt very much that
there is _any_ archive outside continental Europe that looks after
rolls in this way.

Dan Wilson, London