LINGUAPHONE
A
different kind of company from most of the others on this site, in that its
records were intended to instruct not to entertain. The Linguaphone
Institute is reported to have been set up in 1901, by translator
and teacher Jacques Roston, in order to provide people with language
courses that could be studied at home. They proved immensely popular
and the firm is still in business. Recordings have always been an important part
of Linguaphone courses, and have come in every popular format, from the initial wax cylinders to the digital downloads
of today. There were many records to each course: the German singles shown
above were two of a set of sixteen. Numbering seems to
have consisted of the initials of the language plus a number in the
00s. Each side of a single had its own number, the
first record in the German set being GER-60 / GER-61. The
style of the matrix numbers of the dark-blue-labelled record suggests that Decca did
the metalwork, and that of the numbers of mid-blue record in the 'Linguaphone Institute'
sleeve indicates that it was cut by Pye, but Linguaphone
had its own presses and they were capable of producing many tens
of thousands of singles per week, which enabled it to do a
lot of contract pressings for companies both major and minor in addition to
manufacturing its own records - see the bottom of the 'Matrix Numbers
And Other Run-Off Markings' page. There are generally no dates on the labels
of the company's own records; presumably they were pressed and re-pressed throughout the vinyl
era. However, some courses, with 7" records to accompany them,
first saw the light of day in the 1970s -
singles accompanying a Greek course had '1975' on their labels (2) and a German course by Ingrid K.
J. Williams (and others) was published in 1971, to give two examples - and thus
the label qualifies for this site.
Copyright 2010 Robert Lyons.