^#smrgSAHAF The Long Playing Record Guide : For Every Record Collector - 1955

By 1955 Warren DeMotte finished compiling "The Long Playing Record Guide" and he asked Leopold Stokowski to write a preface. Stokowski, who had always been interested in making recordings and in the technical aspects of the gramophone record, saw the uniqueness of DeMotte's project. He agreed. However he did not know DeMotte before; and they never met afterwards.

Various guides and catalogs with listings and comments had already been publishd before. Irving Kolodin had published The New Guide To Recorded Music. The 1950 edition listed 78 RPM shellac discs and the first LP records. DeMotte's guide was really unique in the sense that it listed some 7000 individual records. It was not a duplication of Schwann, The Longplayer, or The Gramophone catalogs. Nor was it based on Roland Gelatt's High Fidelity Record Annual which saw its first edition in July of 1955 and contained reviews which had appeared in High Fidelity Magazine in 1953, 1954 and a few reviews from the early 1955 issues.