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Member since Mar 2013 798 Points | http://images.cch.kcl.ac.uk/charm/liv/pubs/DeccaComplete.pdf
Also for LP world
discography could not have been compiled without access to Decca’s own archives, so Maureen Fortey (the company’s Librarian until 2006) and her successor Andrew Dalton deserve special thanks for their co-operation.
The discography is the culmination of thirty years work by various hands. Malcolm Walker, who was then the editor of “Gramophone”, had the idea of marking Decca’s fiftieth anniversary in 1979 and invited Brian Rust to undertake the initial research. Working from hand-written office files, he compiled a numerical list of around thirty thousand matrices, covering a thousand pages of typescript. Producing a publishable version proved impracticable before the advent of word-processors, but in 2000 Rust’s work was used as the basis of the section of this study covering UK made 78rpm recordings. During the 1980s and ’90s, Malcolm Walker himself undertook further research on the studio day reports at Decca Head Office, unearthing many of the production and engineering credits, besides adding the post-war Swiss, Dutch and French matrix series and UK LP numbers. Over the same period, Michael Gray worked on the Session Return Sheets for the 1950s, bringing in the Viennese, Italian and Scandinavian recordings, and extending overall coverage to 1979. He also supplied the US LP numbers. Philip Stuart collated and edited all this material, supplementing it with his own research into the Artists’ Cards and Label Registers in the Decca archives in Chiswick. He added the Viennese, Italian and Rosengarten matrix series, US 78rpm numbers (mainly taken from “WERM” and the Rigler Deutsch Index) and all release dates. He also researched the French-made discs of 1930-31, all the post-1980 recordings and all CD issues including transfers on non-Decca labels.
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