Exotica


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Posted by Klaus on September 21, 2002 at 06:21:32:

Sometime between 5 and 12 years ago I got a Skylark catalogue in my hands. Not that I ever would buy such a brass "instrument", yet that catalogue continues to fascinate me.

I have been very close to a Chinese clan in my own country, so I know quite a bit about the Chinese way of thinking. When it comes to salesmanship, everything goes about the quantity one can haul over the counter. Quality and customer satisfaction are very minor factors, if one just stays exactly within the limits of the local law, which is always considered as an arbitrary and basically weird item.

You can see that attitude very clearly demonstrated in the specs. Nothing whatsoever about any of the instruments, but for the number of pieces in each container, the size of the container, and the weight of the container.

There are also a few Chinese instruments shown, some with strong western influence in their technical "gestalt".

This 6 pages chosen from the Skylark catalogue are scanned in a much lower resolution to keep file size down.

As usual you will have to go to the open and non-posting Yahoo group linked to below.

One could not say, that this group has had a killer following so far. Yet this cheap way of distribution has paid of so far. I would never have managed to distribute varied mail based sendings to that number of interested people.

Makers represented in the "old" catalogue scan files so far are:

Alexander
Boosey & Hawkes
B&S (with Weltklang)
Conn
Skylark

Klaus



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