Hi MMD -- In early November 2008 I put out a request on MMD for
older "O" roll catalogs and I received one very significant response --
Craig Williams had been working on this problem for some time and had
accumulated a list of roughly 150 rolls.  Each "O" roll usually has
ten songs.  This formed a basis from which to work and with additions
from the Dick Howe archives, the current Paul Gottschalk and Play-Rite
catalogs, I was able to add several more rolls.  Matthew Caulfield had
some quite old rolls catalogs in his files which added several more.

Craig Williams has an OCR program which allows him to take the copies
of catalogs which I had sent him, make scans and drop these into the
list.  I wasted quite a bit of time trying to make scans of labels at
my location and emailing them to Craig.  My scanning techniques were
inadequate so I ended up cross referencing his list with the materials
I had acquired and sending the new materials to Craig by snail mail.

It took several mailings from these several sources but we were able
to increase the "O" roll list to 300, double the original number.
Craig worked wonders with this list and it is presented in several
ways for the researcher.

It is readily apparent that there are still many rolls to be added
to the list.  If anyone has a collection of "O" rolls please try to
determine if you have any that are not on the list and get that
information to either Craig or me.  Really old catalogs from the 'teens
would be fantastic but none have come to light so far.  The earliest
catalogs would most likely be those of the Operators Piano Company of
Chicago, the apparent developer of the "O" roll concept.

Thanks to everyone who helped on this project, it's been a lot of fun.

Tom Hutchinson

 [ See the growing list of "O" rolls at
 [ http://www.mmdigest.com/Gallery/MMMedia/O-rollList.html 
 [ -- Robbie