Fontes Artis Musicae

Anyone who is interested in German shellac records—whether as a collector, a researcher or a discophile—will have heard of Rainer Lotz. Lotz, who was born in Hamburg, says that he started collecting records in 1955 and is still doing so today. However, his talents include [End Page 378] networking as well as collecting. Together these form the foundation on which his life's work is based: Das Bilderlexikon der deutschen Schellack-Schallplatten (The German Record Label Book). This encyclopaedia is the work of the century—so much can be said even now.

Although the five-volume encyclopaedia clearly bears Lotz's signature, his long-time collaborators, Michael Gunrem and Stephan Puille, are also named as authors. Both of them are collectors with an outstanding knowledge of their subject, and their rare images, valuable notes, and important background information contribute significantly to the success of the work. However, they are not the only ones: around 300 other names are listed in the acknowledgements, including collectors, archivists, researchers, and institutions from all over the world whose knowledge has flowed into this lexicon, the creation of which spanned several decades. Rainer Lotz understands his pictorial encyclopaedia as a collation of information from a global community, and sees himself not as a guru, but rather as a kind of guiding spirit. This is no doubt another reason for the scope and quality of the work.

The desire to create a list of all the German shellac record labels is not new. Forty years ago, Klaus Teubig published a list of this kind in the article Deutsche Schellackschallplattenmarken 1894–1958 (German Shellac Record Labels 1894–1958), which appeared in Forum Musikbibliothek (20, no. 2 [1980]). This was largely based on the German Music Archive's collection of records at that time and was supplemented by additional information from older publications on this subject, including Rainer Lotz's Grammophonplatten aus der Ragtime-Ära (Gramophone Records from the Ragtime Era [Dortmund: Harenberg Kommunikation]), which was published in 1979. Klaus Teubig's list encompasses around 300 labels, for each of which he names the owners and the years of production. There are no illustrations. In 1988, Franz Schorn published the illustrated volume Alte Schallplatten-Marken (Old Record Labels [Wilhelmshaven: Florian Noetzel]), which mainly focuses on leading German shellac labels. By around 1993, Michael Gunrem already knew of 750 labels dating back to the shellac era, and nowadays there are of course other dictionaries and online lists on this subject. The most important authors of these include Sutton & Nauck, who concentrate on American labels, and Yuri Bernikov, who maintains an excellent list of Russian records. In England, Frank Andrews and Brian Rust in The American Record Label Book (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1978) spent decades collecting information about British and American labels.

People who are familiar with the preliminary work carried out and lists compiled for other countries will be particularly impressed by the scope, wealth of information, and meticulousness of this pictorial encyclopaedia. Lotz fills more than 2,200 pages with essential information on record labels and illustrates them with more than 13,000 colour images. The structure is always the same: each label is printed in colour together with information on the series (numerical blocks), the number of records produced, the label owner, the record manufacturer, distribution, the repertoire recorded, the production period, and the colour and designs printed on the labels themselves. Even more fascinating is the body of text, which provides background information on almost every label—just a few lines for labels that are largely unknown, for others half a page or more.

Here there are a few curiosities and a number of narratives that are quite exciting from the perspective of industrial history. One example is the label Waffah-Record, the name of...