Rich Lipp Piano Serial Numbers

Richard Lipp and Sohn piano serial number reference information. Find out your piano's age. Besbrode Pianos Leeds UK.

A NON-PROFIT SERVICE – NO FUNDING, NO SPONSORSHIP, JUST YOUR DONATIONS (Updated January 2018) We welcome your feedback by clicking the email button below, or by typing the email address shown there. We’ve moved to Priory Farm House, LN11 8PW (UK) Tel. / text 28 Details of our collection are listed further down this page. - - - - – - - - - – - - - - - - - - - - - HISTORY, NOT VALUATION! Nobody anywhere can guess the value or condition of a piano without inspecting it on the spot, and checking how well it holds in tune, so your local tuner is the best person to ask about that. Here in Britain, where antique pianos are plentiful, unrestored ones have very little value, and we are offered several each year for nothing. The most important factor deciding the value of a piano is not its name, but its condition, and the most important aspect of that is whether it holds in tune, because if it doesn't, repairs can cost over a thousand pounds, and this is usually more than an old piano is worth.

Piano dealers don’t normally deal with antiques, and antiques dealers don’t know much about pianos. In East Anglia, including Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex etc. If every visitor to this site just one pound, we would have a proper museum building, and much more scope for doing research within our archives. Small m onthly donations can also be set up through the button. The following links give a little more detail PIANO HISTORY LINKS pianos from Cristofori’s invention through to modern. Pianos (Querpianos) were the main domestic instruments before upright pianos were perfected. Vertical pianos and earlier attempts at upright pianos.

Cottage pianos. Upright pianos and later ones. And other clues inside your piano. Medals and awards shown on a piano provide clues to its age. Of the piano makers, and some impression of what your ancestors might have done in the piano trade. And aliases used on pianos. As a guide to the date of a piano.

Of the piano makers are rarely available, so our own archives try to fill some of the gaps. Of piano actions – the working parts of the notes.

In piano strings can make tuning very difficult. Can damage your piano. Piano subjects that don’t fit conveniently into other headings. MUSIC of Bill Kibby’s performances on various instruments.

– over two thousand titles that Bill Kibby can play for you. OTHER matters and possible help with them. Has little or nothing to do with pianos or music. Of my childhood in Walthamstow. It is important to understand that although piano history is a minority interest, taking that minority over the whole world means that a great many people are searching for piano history, thousands of hits every day, quite apart from the many people who have a more casual interest, and although this website goes some way to satisfying that need, a museum will be able to do so much more.

At last, we have moved our home to a lovely setting in the Lincolnshire Wolds, where by the kindness and generosity of Wharton Agriculture Ltd., we also have a large barn space in which we will finally be able to display a time-line of piano history alongside the collection of pianos. We are surrounded by nature, animals and birds, but inevitably there are human beings making our life difficult by not doing their jobs properly. OUR COLLECTION In all the world, how many collections have a 300-year time-line of piano history, with thousands of images, thousands of pages of piano information, thousands of index cards, the world’s largest directory of past UK piano firms, and actual pianos for most decades from the 1790s to the 1970s? Imagine a museum of piano history, with the world’s largest specialist archive of related information, a unique pictorial time-line of piano history, thousands of images, thousands of index cards, thousands of printed pages, a collection of Victorian books containing piano ads, irreplaceable reference material, as well as actual pianos from the eighteenth century right through to modern. Although the books were purchased for their piano content, they also provide a wide range of general history. Now imagine taking the world’s largest collection of piano history, and packing it away into a large brick shed.

We had all the ingredients, but sadly, our humble building at Yarmouth was barely big enough to store our unique and growing collection, let alone display it, so for years, the pianos have been crammed in together, and the archives were functional but not on display. At one time, the only way into the room was to climb on a stool, then up onto a piano, crawl along it, then along another one, and down onto a stool! I have spent my life achieving lots of things that people said were impossible, some of them are listed on this website, but for ten years, the big challenge has been to find a way into a permanent home for this unique and irreplaceable collection, before I get too old to do it justice.

“A calling that cannot be realised becomes a burden” - Gunther von Hagens CHERISH YOUR ASPIRATIONS! General (non-piano) History items are. We are a world centre for piano history, we deal with enquiries from around the world every day, and I find myself in the position of being the keeper and protector of a unique history collection, not just because it is my passion, or because of anything it can do for me. It deserves to survive long after I am forgotten, because people need it. Visiting pianos at many museums, it is interesting that there is usually little or no historical information attached to them, whereas we have more than we can possibly display. Recently, we supplied a dozen items to a World War I display, and a friend was immensely impressed with what was, after all, a tiny fraction of our display material.

We also offer occasional lectures on piano history to Women’s Institutes, colleges, museums, schools, etc., and I am always impressed by the enthusiasm of so many people who want to learn more about pianos, and ask very searching questions. At the end of 2014, the Eastern Daily Press very kindly did a whole-page feature on our collection, and our plight in trying to find funding or sponsorship for a proper museum building. I watched a television programme about a man who collected worthless junk for years. Everyone agreed it was junk, nobody understood, but one day, he bought a building, and all of that “junk” suddenly came together to form a wonderfully-integrated display.

What we have here is perhaps the piano equivalent, there is no cash value in the individual items, the historical value is in what they make together. At least it seems a little more reasonable to me than the man who collected live crocodiles! In the past twenty years, a total of seven other projects have very kindly offered to house our collection within theirs “This time, I had the answer right here in my hand, then I touched it, and it had turned to sand.” One by one, they all fell by the wayside and ceased to exist, but we are still here! In 2007, we moved to Great Yarmouth when we were offered a large museum space in a wonderful Georgian setting, but sadly, after months of intensive preparatory work, the premises proved to be unsuitable because of problems with parking, disabled access and egress, fire regulations, legal wranglings, and differences of opinion between the residents and the local council about many things, including the previously-stipulated ground floor space, which was a matter of public record. Not only that, we were asked to put my most treasured possessions (and my life’s work) into a building where anyone could walk in when we weren’t there!

What seemed like a gift from heaven to house our collection for a peppercorn rent ended up with the council wanting us to invest thousands of pounds for an upstairs venue that had not been designed to fit in with modern regulations. Ironically, it was only in the process of designing displays for that museum that I really began to appreciate the scope of what we have here. People often say that we will need a lot of space to display three dozen pianos and organs, but what they don’t realise is that in order to display the more important history items at a reasonable size, we would need even more display width. To add to our problems, Yarmouth is a flood risk area, and although we said “it hasn’t flooded since 1953”, within a few months of moving in, we had a near miss when we were evacuated because of flooding just along the road.

I had this image in my mind of all the pianos floating down the river! We were not troubled by flood waters, but greatly troubled by the flood warnings, which had us in a panic to get irreplaceable books and paperwork into the house, and upstairs. In the process, electronics got broken, the books were thrown into chaos, I strained my back, and we were exhausted.

We couldn’t keep doing that. Dear Liza, We can’t get a building without funding. We can’t get funding without charitable status. We can’t get charitable status without an income of £5,000.

We can’t raise that income without a building..But we can’t get a building without funding! Here, you can see just a small selection of the images for the 1700s, and there are 6 times as many for the 1800s, before we even get to the 1900s. In a way, the pianos are only window dressing, the main collection is history.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. I began collecting musical instrument information around 1958, and focussed on pianos from 1963. When I left college in 1965, I realised that there were many unanswered questions about piano history, and as I began seeking them, people were already asking me for help.

My Piano Archives service was dealing with historical enquires by 1972, when home computers didn’t exist, and everything was done with a pen, a typewriter and a photocopier. By 1989, I had a shop at Lowestoft, and was writing computer software that could search through the files overnight, and print out the results while I slept. Things are a teeny bit quicker with modern computers, but less convenient for writing one’s own software. In 1990, I began 14 years of major illness, and was given no help at all by the NHS.

I was incapable of going out to work, and while my current life was showing no progress, I tried to invest in my future by working on piano history whenever I had a burst of energy. That intermittent work laid the foundation for the service we now provide every day, read by thousands of people all around the world. The original PianoGen web pages were set up in 2001 in conjunction with - Britain’s largest piano website. Sadly, although we have always known that “gen” meant information, many people still do not understand what “Piano Gen” means, so now, we have a more logical name Since 2001, I have dealt with thousands of postings on the piano history forum, in addition to our own extensive clientele. A recent Google search revealed 38,800 internet entries connecting “Kibby” with “piano”, while “piano history centre” showed 785,000 entries. The hits for my forum postings about Spencer pianos alone are in excess of twenty thousand. We supply information to many museums, archives and specialists around the world who only deal with specific aspects of pianos, and we also receive information from them, we don’t just quote from books, we add to the existing knowledge.

Because we have so far been unable to locate major funding or sponsorship, our active research is aimed at antique British pianos, so anything else that arrives is a matter of luck, but with growing worldwide demand, we never discard any kind of piano information, and the Piano History Centreworks together with the specialists in researching, filing and storing all kinds of piano information. It is fair to add that although we try to help with any pianos Our active research is aimed at antique British pianos. The majority of those were manufactured in London. The majority of their factories were in the Camden Town and St.Pancras areas. Many piano books are written by professional writers who have no experience of pianos, or only have a very narrow view of the subject.

On the internet, text is often misleading, and you will find a lot more reliable material from Google Images, but unfortunately, huge amounts of space on the net are wasted on images that are not labelled properly: if you are looking for Broadwood square pianos, you won’t be able to find them if they are labelled “xyz123” or “our piano”, they are useless to most people because a search will not find them, so a lot of our work is in cataloguing and cross-referencing these. My own website suffers from this because it is a home-made site and we can’t afford to pay internets geeks inflated prices. Just for fun, try searching for paino or panio. THE AGE OF MISINFORMATION A lot of the misinformation about piano history has arisen from people writing books and phrasing things badly, or misquoting information, or quoting other authors without realising that they had got it wrong. I have written to authors, challenging statements they made, and the usual answer is that they read it somewhere else, and took it to be correct.

Sometimes, there is a whole chain of people quoting previous authors, and this applies especially to serial number dates. Nobody is immune to misinformation, and the tangled web often makes matters worse by spreading misinformation more rapidly so, as they often say in CSI or NCIS, “follow the evidence”. I spend a lot of my time searching for original unadulterated information from paperwork, or the pianos themselves, but even that will have human errors.

It might seem that by looking at books written a century ago, we would get nearer to the original truth, but this is not always the case, they didn’t have the benefit of later research, and people like Michel, Dolge and Brinsmead published all kinds of misinformation, commenting on aspects they knew very little about, or carefully quoting misinformation from each other. Our collection includes over 5,000 index cards; thousands of printed pages; over 40,000 computer images; general reference books on the pianoforte; uniquely-detailed visual time-line of piano history; 34 pianos ranging in date from the 1790s to the 1970s; miniature pianos, music boxes and piano-shaped ornaments; a growing archive comprising hundreds of old sheet music copies; thousands of computer text pages, listing over thirty thousand names; a range of Victorian books from 1844 onwards, purchased for their piano content. The world’s largest directory of UK piano firms.

If you wanted to look up a local piano firm you might look in Yellow Pages. Our lists cover not only most of the towns, but most periods going right back to the 1700s. DIRECTORIES & OLD BOOKS Here is a brief summary of some of the directory lists and other sources we have available for reference, in addition to our more modern reference books: some are complete originals, others are just piano lists: there are many more to be added, containing over a million entries, and far too many for us to make them available online without major funding, quite apart from the enormity of the copyright problems. There are London lists for every decade. Early directories are written in name order, some musical instrument makers did not specify which instruments they made, and it is easy to miss piano entries unless one knows what to look for. If you are searching for London names in any trade, it is worth remembering that we have a selection of complete London Directories from 1786 to 1892.

We also have incomplete lists of piano items found in London alphabetical directories for 1765 1768 1769 1771 1772 1774 1775 1778 1782 1794 1797. Download Concone 50 Lezioni Pdf. In some cases, Longman’s is the only music firm listed. 1786 Lownde’s London Directory. 1790 Edinburgh Directory. 1792 Lownde’s London Directory. 1794 London directory 1805 Various London directories 1809 Glasgow 1814 Pigot's Directory of Chester.

(Trades) 1814 Pigot's Directory of Leeds. (Trades) 1814 Pigot's Directory of Liverpool. (Trades) 1816 Birmingham Directory 1817 Leeds 1817 Johnstone's Directory of London 1817 Leeds Directory 1819 Post Office London Directory 1820 Glasgow 1820 Post Office London Directory 1820 Glasgow Directory 1822 Huddersfield 1822 Pigot & Co. Robert Buettner Epub Reader there. ' S Directory of London; Musical Instrument makers 1824 Canterbury 1824 Post Office London Directory 1824 Kent Directory 1825 Nottingham 1825 Pigot & Co., London 1825 Nottingham Directory 1827 Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary 1828 Leamington Directory 1828 Pigot's National Commercial Directory covers an odd selection of major towns and cities in some (but not all) counties, and strangely avoids London. From this, I copied every list that had piano, organ or music firms, including Chester, Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Scarborough, etc.