Digital parchment: Catalog archive logs the history of Elderly Instruments

A new feature on Elderly Instrument’s website is loaded with pure Lansing nostalgia. Anybody familiar with the instrument shop has likely picked up a copy of its fabled catalog at one time or another before it was discontinued in 2014. For a fun trip down memory lane, you can check out the covers of each catalog in ultra high resolution on Elderly.com.

A cursory glance of the catalogs, compiled by Elderly’s Michael Erlewine, is an easy way to track the evolution and consistency of the shop. The cover of the first edition — released in 1975, three years after the shop was first opened — features a late 19th-century photograph, scalped from a music magazine called Cadenza, of a musician hoisting a fancy banjo.

Compared to the later issues of the catalog, and especially when looking at it side-by-side with the high-tech functions of Elderly’s website, it looks totally archaic — a testament to how much time has passed since Elderly has opened.

Elderly founder Stan Werbin still fondly remembers the inception of the catalog.

“We opened in 1972, and by 1974, we knew we had a lot of unusual content. We thought we could sell more if we put out mail-order catalogs,” Werbin said. “In those days, there weren’t too many places that were selling musical instruments by mail. Of course, nowadays you can find thousands of people that will sell you stuff off their website.”

The process of putting together the original catalogs was painful. Elderly used press type, a form of rub-on lettering, for its headlines and an early IBM electric typewriter for the body copy on the pages.

What was written by typewriter was then sliced out with an X-Acto knife and pasted onto the larger pages of the catalog’s master copy. Elderly co-founder Sharon Burton led the project, as she had experience with layouts thanks to her days editing her high school’s newspaper.

“Nobody had a computer,” Werbin said. “You couldn’t lay things out on the screen as everybody does now. What we can do now is what we used to dream about back then. It would’ve been so much easier. We put it together with what we had.”

Before word processing and computers came along to expedite the process, producing a catalog by hand while also running a musical instruments shop could take upwards of an entire year. You can note just how long it took Elderly’s small staff by observing the large gap between the original 1975 issue and the following issues in 1977 and 1981.

After Elderly produced the master sheets, it would hand them off to a printing company in Grand Ledge.

“The printer would take a high-quality photograph of it all, this was all black and white. Color printing was a whole different ball of wax in those days. From that, they created the plates that printed the catalogs,” Werbin said.

Werbin estimated that the original run of catalogs was anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000 copies. Catalogs were distributed primarily for free. Customers could just grab a copy from the shop, and stacks of the catalog would quickly disappear.

“When we first put them out in the store, people would just take them. They went so quickly from the store that we decided to charge for it. I think we put it for a dollar or two, and that slowed down how quickly they disappeared. But we’d still give them away to anybody that wanted one,” Werbin said. “We figured people ordering from us would make up for the cost of the catalog.”

Elderly would also distribute its mail-order catalog by taking out advertisements in larger magazines such as Guitar Player and Banjo Newsletter.

Werbin said in the long run it was more than worth it to practically give the catalog away. “We’re still here. Those catalogs gave us a national reputation fairly quickly and we’ve maintained that for a long time. It wasn’t until 2014 that we put out our last catalog.”

As the years and decades went on, the catalog’s cover featured artwork from prominent Lansing artists such as Kathryn Darnell and Dennis Preston. Werbin said Elderly and its customers were so bound to the culture of its catalog that it put out editions long past the catalog’s practicality.

“If we were smarter, we probably would’ve stopped producing them five or 10 years earlier. By then, the Internet was a happening thing,” Werbin said. “The catalog was so important to our store’s identity that we kept producing them and sending them out for free. It got to the point where it was just costing too much. It’s more efficient to have a website.”

While Elderly has certainly invested a lot of energy into crafting a professional and easy-to-use website, Werbin hinted that it isn’t entirely impossible for the catalog to make a comeback one of these days.

“It doesn’t seem to me like we would. But you’ve got me thinking because our 50th anniversary is coming up in two years. Wouldn’t it be interesting to have some kind of a small catalog — just to have it? If it happens, it’s your fault,” Werbin laughed.