A Diamond (Disc) as Big as the Ritz

When I was about ten years old, I became the proud possessor of an Edison Diamond Disc phonograph. This was under the objection of my mother, who of course did not want such a huge and ugly piece of junk in her house. It had been bought by my Aunt Betty at a sale, with the appropriate records, and sat at my grandmother’s house taking up prime floor space. Because I had early on been bitten by the old music bug, and had enjoyed a Pathé portable that gave me hours of pleasure until the spring snapped, I was besotted with the beast. My fascination with it was frankly an annoyance to my relatives. In the fashion of the time, its dark finish had been coated with a thick green antiquing, itself painted over a coat of pink. It seemed a ghastly thing to do to a piece of furniture, but the old machine played loud and clear. I discovered immediately that it would not play standard shellac records but that I had to content myself with Edison’s proprietary Diamond Discs, vertically recorded and pressed on a quarter-inch sawdust sandwich coated with a thin lamination of shellac. My mother allowed this monstrosity (which I loved) to be delivered into our basement, where it a