A New Look at Old Band Books

By Mike Pearce
 In the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries, thousands of brass bands dotted the American landscape. Those ensembles played music assembled in march size folios and band books. As those band books now find their way into auctions from attics and basements, they become attractive collectibles for a select number of band history collectors and performers. By observing a few procurement guidelines, old band books can be interesting and profitable.
 Publication dates, which may range from the 1860s through the 1930s, are important but not always available. Depending on the publisher and whether or not the book was actually published or merely assembled by a band, dates may or may not be present and, when they are, many are in Roman numerals. Buyers researching literature of early American bands will be interested in older books, while another group, those maintaining reenactment bands playing old music, may prefer march books of the 20th Century because those compilations contain well known marches by noteworthy American composers. Individuals seeking music to perform will be particularly interested if multiple copies of a book, possibly even a full set that includes woodwinds, brasses, and percussion, are available.
 Because of a desire to have something written by a famous American or possibly to help decorate a music room, others will be anxious to find something written by R. B. Hall, P. S. Gilmore, Fred Jewell, Edwin Franko Goldman, Henry Fillmore, Harry Alford, Karl King,  John Philip Sousa, or other American march composers. Though books of marches and folio collections command considerable interest, loose leaf pages of individual instrument parts don’t and normally should be avoided.
 A common practice for early bands was to purchase music folios with blank pages, then glue pages from marches on the blanks, making up “books” for each instrument, like 1st cornet or tuba, of the band’s favorite marches. If copyright dates were preserved on the individual pages, it is often possible to determine the age of such folios.
 Other collections that will interest band history aficionados are specialty collections that contain circus marches, Salvation Army Brass Band music, marches for military bands, operatic melodies, Strauss waltzes, and so on.
 Some discretion needs to be used to avoid books that were abused or have lost their covers, and those printed on paper that has become too fragile to handle easily. Depending on age, condition, and rarity, vintage band books are often mixed with larger lots of miscellaneous print matter, can be bought for less than a dollar, then bring retail prices ranging from a few dollars to $75 or $100 each. In the period from about 1940 to the present, there were countless band methods and concert folios produced, usually in letter size format, which were intended for school band programs and don’t interest collectors nearly as much as the older materials written for professional and town bands of the preceding one hundred years.
 The next time you see old band books in an estate auction, give some thought to adding them to your inventory and offering them to decorators, organizers of reenactment bands, and collectors of band history material.

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