I’m trying to establish the edition history of the Continental LPs of Enesco playing the Bach Sonatas and Partitas on Don Gabor’s label, Continental. They were issued as three individual LPs and all three together, all four editions being the same long box with velvet-flecked covers. They are almost always found as the three record set.
They were first listed in the Schwann September, 1950 catalog.
The Schwann listing in December, 1950, lists them as Continental 104/106, implying an album release with no indication they were also available as singles. Yet the Billboard review of August, 26, 1950, is for CLP-104 only.
The base of the spine spine of 104/106 lists them as 104-105-106.
On Nov 1, 2014, a copy of Continental 104 was sold on eBay (for over $ 2,500). According to Popsike, a web site that tracks eBay record sales back to 2006, this is the first time any of the single record packages was sold there ever. At least 15 copies of the 3 LP set had sold in the same venue during the 2006-2014 period.
Questions:
Can someone with the September, 1950 Schwann tell me how the listing appears in that issue, with as close an approximation of the typography of the numbers as is feasible? Was it listed in the New Release pages for August, 1950? Does it indicate if singles were available? The set?
Is there an ad for Continental in this issue as well? In October? November? If so, does this indicate that single LP issues were also available? My December issue has a two-page ad for Remingon and one for Plymouth, both later Gabor labels.
My file for Continental has pre-LP catalogs and supplements only. Has anyone an LP catalog of theirs that lists these records?
According to Kurtz Myer’s “Record Ratings,” there was little notice taken of the Enesco set in the record review press. It was the subject of a “Rarisima” column in “Classic Record Collector” but adds no
I’m preparing to list my copies of the other two in eBay and would like to describe it accurately. My assumption going in is that they were first issued as singles and later as a set, which would make the singles the true first edition. This is subject to correction, of course, hence this email.
Steve Smolian
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