I have to excuse my absence for a couple of months in this space because of some health issues and consequent operations, but all is well in the meantime and we continue our merry ways. But because of that the number of new items added has slowed, but recently it has restarted.
As I have said earlier the top of the sales of music boxes in the U.S.A. was in the eighties as far as quantities were concerned. And from the nineties on most music boxes came and come from China and are not the focus of this Collection.
And the Eighties are by now, calculating from 1988, 30 years behind us and older ones even more. It is my perception, without being able to support it with figures, that supply from that period and certainly older periods, has started to dry up a bit. The stream has become a creek and unknown ones (to me) can still be found, but certain items seem to have disappeared. Although on Etsy and eBay there is still a large supply, but more of music boxes that were sold in large quantities. Prices specially for items from appreciated, because of quality, producers as Jozef, Otagiri and Schmid seem to have a tendency to creep up a bit, as do series like Beatrix Potter. But under that level there are still plenty of music boxes that can be bought at reasonable prices.
We are still getting a lot of questions re non-working music mechanisms. Please read before writing what has been written in the web site as many answers can be found there. The same goes for questions about identification of Tunes. Themusicboxman has a tin ear and is not good at recognizing them. This apart from the fact that possibly 10-12.000 different tunes were used over the period from the Collection. There are special groups of people who are interested to solve such riddles, as naming a tune. Please prepare an audiofile and send the file to some of the organisations named in the Links page.
And for last. We are still getting people from all over the world clicking on our web site. The most people come from the English speaking world, thank you, but in all over a hundred different countries are noted, some even from war raged countries like Iraq. And sometimes there is a little bubble, as if the existence has been mentioned locally in one way or another, and we recently saw such bubbles from Russia, France and Brazil. A warm welcome and thank you to you all.
Themusicboxman