[marinettejoe]

I have a very good sounding Martin Stencil made called a Horace sold by Landay Bros. New York. Landay was a chain of music stores that was very large in NYC until their bankruptcy in 1931. I originally thought the sax was made in the mid thirties, but it appears to be late 1920's sax.

http://www.arcade-museum.com/presto/PRESTO-1931-2255/PRESTO-1931-2255-14.pdf

Presto was a music trade press from 1900 to 1941 and has a lot of trade data, though it is bit piano centric.

 

[paulwl]

1931. What an interesting time. (Often not in a good way.)

One of Landay's creditors is listed as U.S. Radio & Television Corp. Television was actually an abortive boomlet around that time. It was low definition and not quite worthy of program development. RCA began work on an electronic system and that killed all interest.

Did you know music stores sold radios then? They had to. Up to now they had sold phonos and records, then all of a sudden nobody could afford them. Only backwoods folk out of the reach of radio kept buying records, and they didn't buy many.

Then one column over you see Majestic Radio. They were in such trouble that in 1932 they bought Columbia Records, which was in even worse trouble, just to see if any synergies could be made. The record biz was just too far gone. Majestic went down the tubes (vacuum of course).

Saxophones? Forget it. You couldn't even pawn a saxophone.

 

[csax]

marinettejoe - thanks for that link to arcade-museum.com, it'll provide some good info "from the horses mouth" for some blog topics. And some real nuggets !

A quick search on 'melody saxophone' showed that even in 1925, manufacturers were facing prejudice against C-Melody saxophones, (e.g.) teachers preferring Eb/Bb saxes, and trying to boost sales - nothing much changed in nearly a decade then...

 

[badenia]

Wow, I am way late to this thread, however, I have information to add. Although Presto shows a bankruptcy filing in 1931, The Elkhart Band Instrument Company, Buescher subsidiary, continued to supply Horace stencil saxes well into the 1930's, possibly as late as 1934/35.

Additionally, since the author of this thread does not provide pictures or a serial number detail, it is possible that this sax was an Elkhart BIC stencil and not Martin. The 50,000 series Elkharts are often mistaken for Martins, because of the beveled, soldered tone-holes. I have several of these Horace stencils in my Elkhart BIC registry. These are discussed in the Elkhart Band Instrument Company Registry thread started by La Porte.