by Edward Tatnall Canby
As I said last month, when you can no longer spread out your recordings luxuriously all over your living room because there are too many and you can't find anything in the mess --then, indeed, you have come to the beginning of the end. You must organize your home library.
I may have seemed facetious last month but was not really. I was merely being literal. As our home systems wax bigger, so do our record collections, in spite of inflation, slowly but surely, like children growing. You hardly notice the difference from day to day, but-. A mere record cabinet, a length of tasteful shelving, a box built to order, these are merely continuing symptoms of trouble, temporary substitutes for the luxury that is lost, those tables and chairs and couches piled high with the goodies, right within reach where you could find them --or so you used to think. You still can't find them. What you need is more than neatness. It is ORDER. And quick access. But please, no file cards.
Now I will admit that before you get to any such pass, there is a vast gray area, for perhaps three quarters of us, whereby our records and tapes are "filed" in a sense but in an exceedingly loose-limbed fashion, not so much by system as by feel and a vague area--memory. Show tunes at one end of a pile, Vivaldi at the other, and misc. in between. This is just fine, as long as it works for you. People do get very good at riffling through. I am writing, though, for the prognosed future, which is not good, unless you stop collecting altogether.
Why not just put the records in order--some order or other--and let 'em sit? As is. Well, you can try. But the companies have ten thousand ways to confuse you. And ruin your eyesight as well as your composure.
There is nothing uniform about the info they put on the product. Covers are nice but mainly for sales. Spines? That skinny, barely visible line of information is supposed to help when you shelve your discs in close order. Half the spine copy is upside down, not to mention around the corner, on front or back, and all of them are sidewise, some to the right, some to the left; you crane your neck first one way and then the other, or stand on your head.
Some are blank and more are rippled so only the tops of the letters show, unreadably. The light is always wrong and the focus fuzzy. Not spines.
How about a nice loose stack on the floor, or in an open box, so you can look down and riffle through, looking at the covers. It works if your records are very loosely stacked. But then, you see, they fall sidewise against each other and the considerable weight is dangerous. Warping. You're beat before you start, here too. Tighten up the stack, and you can't see the covers, or anything else. In the end, you're going to have to try something on your own, to get both order and visibility, which means accessibility. So let's try homemade labels. Gummed labels, or self stick. They take only a moment to put on, and what counts is the code you put on them. It can be fun. You make it up.
Coding The Carnegie
There's a tricky way of making a code that I learned the hard way, long ago in my very first job, as an assistant in an Ivy League college music department. This was in the Thirties. When I got there, the Music Department was just getting started, after a century of musical darkness at that distinguished institution, and we had landed a fish we got the famed Carnegie Collection, literally thousands of 78 records, given to schools and colleges that could use them for teaching and as a loan library. Old Andrew Carnegie, you remember, more or less founded the U.S. public library system; now, for the first time, it was audio, recorded music.
That Collection was stupendous for its day. Not only all those records but also a player, a veritable Jaws of a player, the d-dest machine we'd ever seen and 30 years ahead of its time.
In 1936 it already came as components. One big box held a monster turntable, recording-lathe type, a 10 -ounce magnetic pickup in a straight 16-inch arm (not so advanced!), electronics with stepwise equalizations for both treble and bass, and a huge amplifier, mono, with maybe 50 times the normal whom p. The speaker was mounted in its own matched box, a correctly tuned bass reflex as I remember, and it was so big it took two or three of us to move it. The woofer was 18 inch (!), and there were two tweeters, the very first I had ever seen.
The woofer's electromagnet was as big as a five-gallon pail at something beyond 400 volts. This system was built by an outfit called Federal Telegraph, if memory serves. Telegraph or no, it could blow you right out of a concert hall, even in mono, and I was appointed its boss. Nobody else wanted to touch it. Right then, you see, I discovered the joys of VERY LOUD music, which was some time before you did, I'll bet. Early hi-fi conditioning.
Actual corner from Mozart's Quartet No. 19 in C shows
Canby's "duidecimal" listing.
Out of the blue, I was also appointed to the job of setting up those thousands of records for practical use, in a small office at our headquarters. You can imagine it. Dozens of big cartons were delivered, every one filled with carefully interleaved and padded 78 singles, and within minutes we had them spewed all over everything, ever so carefully, in our frantic joy at this unbelievable bonanza. When calm was at last restored, I got to work.
Yes, there was some sort of catalogue but my boss Professor didn't like catalogues and card files. He wanted to toddle right in there five minutes before he avidly gave his famous and often repeated lecture on the Schubert Unfinished Symphony, before 200 not-so-avid freshmen, and go right to the shelves to find the records in a hurry.
Without looking up a lot of un-memorizeable numbers on cards. Isn't that exactly the way you feel today? So what to do? I gave my soul to those records for months, and in the end I came up with a System which really worked, all things considered.
No cards! Just the records themselves. And labels. A gummed label was "affixed," as they say, on the upper right-hand corner of every green manila folder (equivalent to the modern LP record jacket). On the label went a code, a bold, brief, easily read code which was my big idea. With a bit of practice, you could read it right off in words, the composer, the type of music and the name of the piece. Being a classical collection, we filed under Composer, but the system would work out just as well in other areas with, say, the performer or the title on top. Musical shows by title. Jazz, rock/pop by performer or group or album. Take your choice.
The Long & Short of It
The necessity for any such code is that it be understandable, brief, and very visible to the roving eye. No searching, no eye strain! Thus you need uniformity, especially in the size aspect. Short composers, like Cesar Cui, or long composers, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, must be equally visible. And the same for categories; make 'em brief. But quickly intelligible. That came first of all. It was a challenge.
Now somebody had told me about a thing called duidecimal or something, which was used for records at Vassar College. Innocent me, I did not know that a billion library books were, and are, filed by the ingenious Dewey decimal system, which uses decimals to subdivide numerical categories ad inf.
Say, two books are listed as 795.1 and 795.2 and you have a third that must go in between; it's easy. 795.15. You can get into the millis and the micros if need be --795.16483. I had a better idea, for us. Forget the numbers but borrow that decimal subdividing. And use numbers, with decimals, to indicate alphabet letter order.
What I did was to combine the idea of "instant" abbreviations, for the composers, the categories of music, and the specific titles, with the decimal thing, which I used for the composer. Not his name, but his initial, followed by a number, from 1 to 100, treated as alphabet. How's that? On the shelves, Old Johann Sebastian Bach appeared as a bold 8 15, Beethoven as 8 55, a sort of early zip or area code and even more easy to remember.
We gave the round numbers, so to speak, to the big guys, the famous composers, and put the others in between. The above mentioned Cui, for instance, might have been C 96 and his long-named mate, Castelnuovo --Tedesco C 18. Same length. Any old number would do just so it was approximately in the right alphabetical area. In a very short time you got to remember these "zip" names and if not, there was a handy list right next to the records. If I miscalculated my numerical space, I just added decimals a' la Dewey. If J.S. Bach was 8 15, his youngest son Johann Christian Bach might be B 14 and if, by chance, their first cousin (?) Johann Bernard Bach suddenly turned up, he would get to be B 13.5. My Professor was pleased as all get-out. Just what he wanted, and no cards to bother with.
On a second line of symbols, put below the first, I placed the musical category. Much easier to read below than beside. Same idea, though no great need for decimals. Abbreviations, in caps, instantly interpretable.
Symphony, of course, was SYM. Sonata was SON. Concerto was C. If you were looking for a Bach Passacaglia, you would find it under PASS. And to qualify these categories, we put a prefix in lower case, also instant-style. File accordingly. Piano Concerto came out pf C. Violin Sonata vl SON. How could you go wrong? Standard musical abbreviations, those. Even to fag which, in case you are unclear, refers to a bassoon (faggot). There were complications, of course. There always are. But let them pass; in general our music fitted the system neatly, and so will yours if you will make yourself a similar personal code.
Finally, the third line on the label, below the other two, was the specific title, also abbreviated to taste. Mostly a number, #1 or Op. 44, but sometimes a name. Or a combination, to be sure the piece got in the right place.
Thus--the Schubert Unfinished Symphony, which is #7, would appear as S 40 (top line, bold characters) SYM (second line) and on the bottom, #7 Unf. Read it right off. Only, in those days there' were numerous discs for each work --so you would see #7 Unf, 1 and #7 Unf, 2 and #7 Unf, 3 for the three records of the set. Mostly today it's the other way; we have two or a dozen works on a single disc, which is a problem. Get to that in a moment.
So my Professor could walk in on a Monday morning, go straight to the shelves under Schubert, which is to say S 40, riffle along to SYM, the Schubert Symphonies, and with one hand pull out the three records for the Unfinished under #7 Unf, all in a jiffy.
And be off to his lecture. (Naturally, when the records came back, I had to put them away.) You can see how visible these labels were if you print out with a good felt pen that S 40 in characters about a half-inch high, then below that the SYM, slightly smaller, and the #7 Unf, smallish but still legible at a good distance. Good for the eyes.
Dups, X-es, and Abbvs.
Hey (you say), how about duplications, different performances? Well, in the Thirties there wasn't much problem; we were lucky enough to get even one version of each major work.
In that early electrical era the record companies were much too busy tackling all that music still unrecorded. Today is different, and maybe you'll want a separate symbol, to cope. By performer, perhaps, or conductor. How about Tosc and BWalt for the Toscanini and Bruno Walter versions of the same music? Awful? OK, make up your own. Fortunately, musical names tend to be shorter these days. cDavis and aDavis for the two British conductors, Colin Davis and Andrew Davis.
Or use the record company, say the RCA and the London recordings. Anything that reminds you of what you own. You can even subdivide, for those determined artists who do the same piece over and over. VonK 1 and VonK 2that's Von Karajan.
Cross filing is a real problem, with more than one significant piece on a single record. In jazz it might be Bessie Smith (BSmith) on one side and Louis Armstrong (LArms) on the other; in classical, you might have the Beethoven Fifth Symphony on side 1 and the Schubert Unfinished on Side 2. You can't split the disc down the middle and file each in its right place. One wary answer, still without file cards, useful with extreme moderation, is the record dummy. But don't go too far.
You cut cardboard squares the size of an LP (or a tape), or collect some of those rigid board squares they use for record shipping. Put your usuable label on the record itself for the main item, side 1, in this case the Beethoven, B 55 SYM 5. Then take one of the cardboards and put a label on it, in the usual place, for the Schubert, just as though this were a real record. Now, directly underneath The Schubert label put another, very visible, with the Beethoven information on it, exactly like the label on the real record. Instant cross reference! File the dummy disc right among the S records, like a real record. It tells you that (a) you do own the Schubert Unfinished but (b)
it is on the back of the Beethoven (which you might have forgotten); so go find it there.
Use dummies only for recordings you really feel are favorites. Otherwise you'll be making more dummies than you have disc or tapes --say all 16 items on an LP pop record. Quick way to go nuts.
So there it is. I am aware that this three-or four-symbol label system, devised for a very big classical collection, sounds dreadfully complicated for your modest library, which isn't that big (nor are you that ambitious). I hasten to repeat that the details are yours to invent, and you can be much less fancy and still profit. What really counts here is first --no cards. And second-a label code that is uniform, brief, and immediately readable right on the record. Not a batch of meaningless numbers that have to be looked up, before you can find anything. Short of a complete professional-type card file system, this is surely the best way for most of us to make a beginning, and it canbe amusing and pleasant too. Use your abbreviational ingenuity! Go to town.
Yeah, man (Yessir), listen to those jazz greats, not only BSmith and LArms but old FatsW himself and the ever enduring BGood. You know 'em all, don't you, and you can find 'em too.
And take the musical show! The old ones, like "Naughty Marietta" turn up NMar; "The Student Prince" would obviously be StudP, a stud all right.
You can even get help from the P.O., which has the right idea. " Oklahoma!" OK! When they get to a musical on my state, " Connecticut!" the label will be just as brief and just as memorable--CT!
(Source: Audio magazine, Dec. 1978; by Edward Tatnall Canby)
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