Dear MMDs,  In Chartres (France), a quiet old city one hour by train
or by car from Paris and two large international airports, there are
for many years now two mechanical music auctions per year conducted
by Galerie de Chartres, and you can see the catalogues of the past
auctions on the MMD web site.

The next auction is on Sunday, Dec. 4th, 2005.  Amidst the highlights
(about 100 lots of mechanical music) are

- Davrainville, a very fine and exceptional parlour and dance organ,
handle-operated, 3 stops, 29 keys, 12 tunes, with a second cylinder.

- A very good Mills Violano Virtuoso, completely restored.

- A very interesting 9-tunes portable organ, wonderfully noted (probably
by Gavioli, end of XIXth century) on a base by Bruder of Waldkirch,
and with a Limonaire label!

- Good large coin-operated barrel pianos, and a good Kuhl-Klatt
electro-pneumatic piano.

- Many musical boxes, with disc (Stella, Adler, Orpheus, Troubadour,
etc.) or cylinder (Voix Célestes, sublime harmony, by Ullmann, L'Epée,
Ami Rivenc, etc.).

- Good musical clock pictures (one three-dimensional, rather rare).

- Several organettes (Organina Thibouville, Manopan, etc.) and
serinettes.

- Related postcards and literature, and many small musical artifacts,
amidst them a rare "Speaking images book" in German, and a curious
musical toilet paper dispenser...  Around 1900, I wonder which objects
did not include a musical movement !

- A large collection of about 800 (!!!) 33-rpm records about mechanical
music, mainly large fairground, dance and street organs.

There are also circa 60 lots of good automata (a rope dancer with
musicians, a Lambert clown with the moon, a Lambert clown guitar
player, a Lambert Russian girl opening an egg, etc.), and 30 lots of
phonographs and 15 lots of fairground artifacts (2 horses by Bayol).

The day before (Saturday, Dec. 3rd) there is a large auction of several
hundred dolls.  For info, or to get a catalogue :

Galerie de Chartres
Tel. +33 (0) 2 37 88 28 28
Fax : + 33 (0) 2 37 88 28 20
E-mail : chartres@galeriedechartres.com

Thanks to Robbie Rhodes, Joyce Brite and Jody Kravitz, the catalogue
will be posted around mid-November on the MMD web site at
http://mmd.foxtail.com/Auctions/ 

With best regards,
Philippe Rouillé (Paris, France)
http://www.musicamecanica.org/