Schwann song

Does anyone else miss the Schwann Catalog?

I know I do! When I was a little kid there would be Schwann catalogs kicking around my house. You could pick them up at record stores and I think they were free. Well, they had to have been free because knowing my family we would not have been shelling out for them.

You could look up any piece in the Schwann catalog and it would tell you what recordings were out there. It was much simpler than the Internet and more reliable. I love the Internet and it is good for a lot of things but I am sorry, the Schwann catalog kept better track of records than the Internet does. Now they are praised for their style, too, how about that?

There is some kind of Schwann catalog now. But it will cost you a fortune. I have spent so much money on my Pennario research that I just can't shell out here and there for all this other stuff. Our library never subscribes to anything that would save me money.

A few weeks ago I did buy an old Schwann catalog on eBay. It cost me something like $10 including shipping. Unbelievable, for something that used to be free. But I needed an old one so I could see which Pennario records were in print and which were not and who the competition was. And I just needed it laid out there who recorded what. It is really hard to straighten out all this information online.

Last night Howard was out late at Lounge Academy so I went to bed with the Schwann catalog.

Hahaha... even at the time I was appreciating how goofy it was, using this as my bedtime reading. I was sipping my yummy Peach Sleepytime tea, which I use to bring me down after working on my book for hours. And I am just turning the pages of this Schwann catalog, reading it like a novel. Getting a picture of the world as it was in 1965. I bought the oldest Schwann catalog I could find.

My mom used to laugh about how when I was a baby, I needed something in my crib to read or I would not sleep. She used to give me the Sears catalog. There are baby photos of me sitting in my crib paging through the Sears catalog.

Last night my last memory before falling asleep was dropping the Schwann catalog to the floor next to the bed, and hearing Howard walking in.

And so to sleep!