Thomas J. Holmes

Caveat Title Browser.

If you just looked at the title of this, you'd likely think this is a songbook. It isn't. It's a list of folk music books that were in libraries in Cleveland in 1931. You won't find a single song in here. It's basically a printed edition of a card catalog.

Given that the catalog was published three generations ago, it isn't even accurate any more. It was presumably out of date by 1940. (Which makes it pretty ridiculous that at least one of these "facsimile reprint" companies has issued a new edition of the thing. The existence of such a reprint proves only that these "facsimile publisher" companies exercise no editorial sense or intelligence.) I suppose there is reason for a few copies to be preserved; it's history. But unless you're sleuthing early twentieth century libraries, it's not likely that you'll care about the exact list of books they had in Cleveland in 1931.

That doesn't make it entirely useless. There are few good bibliographies of folk music books in existence. A list of many hundreds of books in this category has its uses -- there were books in here that I had never heard of before. So it might give you some ideas for books to hunt for. Most of them will be pretty hard to find, though.

Bottom line: Unless you want a list of books, don't buy this. And if you do want a list of books, it's still probably not worth spending much for.… (altro)