To fill in a bit more about the Audiographic rolls, they were first
introduced in October 1926 under the title "The World's Music", in
a fit of musical education by Aeolian's London branch.  From about
November 1927 a smaller number of titles were also made in America,
and a handful of titles were added in America but not issued in
Britain.  The series petered out in the middle of 1930.

The term "Audiographic" started not as their name but a description,
and it pretty well sums them up: they were printed with all sorts of
graphics to help understand the music -- an early and very thorough
multi-media format.  Graphics included extracts of musical notation,
printed lines over the perforations to show how the musical themes fit
together, descriptive text about the musical structure and much more,
and also flowery descriptions about what the music might mean.

Some rolls carry bar lines to highlight the pianist's rubato and
interpretation, which can be very interesting to observe.  All this
plus illustrations using specially-commissioned wood-cuts and the like,
plus photographs, and a huge list of musical worthies at the start to
make clear to the user just what depth of knowledge they were drawing
from.

At the start there were four categories: Biographical, Analytical,
Running Comment and Annotated (later simplified into Student and Popular
editions).  Biographical focused on the composer, with a number of
extracts from various compositions and pianists.  Analytical focused on
a major piece of music with several extracts from it carefully explained
before reaching the performance proper.  Running comment were just that,
explaining the music as it went along without the extracts first, and
Annotated simply carried fancy leaders that were often glued to normal
rolls.  These latter were reserved for simpler pieces that were not
felt to need much explanation, and some of them were aimed at children.

All rolls were beautifully printed in the very crispest letterpress
rather than the cheap rubber-stamps seen on most rolls, often in two
colours.  As Aeolian said, by well-considered descriptions such as
those described ordinary listeners could get from these rolls in an
hour or so what would be hard for a musically-aware reader to put
together in a month's reading in books.  Maybe a bit of an exaggeration
but probably true enough.

Charles Davis Smith's catalogue is certainly not complete for this
series.  I have one roll that's not listed, D895 "Airs from the
Beggar's Opera," played by Robert Armbruster, and I gather there are
quite a number of other unlisted titles.  There are also a number of
errors where he clearly had contradictory or incomplete information.

My original question arose because sometimes alternative performances
were used when the rolls were issued in America, apparently using the
same printed material -- not that I've ever put two versions together
to check.  I wondered if these variants were real or listing errors
either on Smith's part or in Aeolian's own lists.  I've had a couple
of helpful replies, but nothing conclusive either way beyond confirming
some of Smith's pianists, although in one case I'd still like to
compare the rolls.

For those who are interested in these rolls but don't want to pay
funny-money prices for them, each and every British issue came out as
an 88-note roll as well, identical in every way to the Duo-Art except
for the dynamic coding but (bizarrely) omitting the pianist's name and
picture.  These turn up on British eBay from time to time and fetch
little more than ordinary 88-note rolls.  In some ways they are more
involving because sitting in front of the piano to pedal them makes
reading them more natural.

Julian Dyer