Okay, I've bought the book. It's in very good condition, hard cover, missing the dust jacket however. And it's quite heavy, being on art paper. There are 336 pages.
Title: Loudspeakers
Author: G.A. Briggs with R.E. Cooke, B.Sc. (Eng.) as Technical Editor.
Published by Rank Wharfedale Ltd.
Fifth edition (revised and enlarged) 1958, reprinted 1972.
The introduction tells us that the first edition appeared in 1948 with card covers and a mere 78 pages.
This book has a nice aerial view photo of Wharfedale, showing a rather pleasant country estate and the river Wharfe. Chapter 1 is a short autobiography of Mr Briggs and his company. An entertaining read.
A humourous little quote from ch.1:
"The delicate work of cone and coil assembly needs the feminine touch, so every evening I took home two hat boxes containing cones and coils which Mrs Briggs assembled. I took them back to the Bradford cellar next morning, ready for our day's production. I can say this: when Mrs Briggs put a coil on the neck of a cone it stayed put; we never had a loose joint. She also became a first-class solderer of speech coil wire to eyelets in cones.
"Incidentally, this accounts for the adoption of the name WHARFEDALE, as we lived in Ilkley, one of the beauty spots in the very beautiful valley of the River Wharfe. I recall that 20 years later I was giving a demonstration in Toronto, when at question time someone jumped up and asked why our speakers were named Wharfedale when they were made in Bradford, which is in Airedale. I pointed out that the beauty of Wharfedale matched the beauty of the product (ahem!) and that we could not risk using a name like Airedale in case dissatisfied customers wrote and complained that we were dirty dogs; whereupon a lady observed very brightly that we might at least have adopted Airedale as a suitable name for our woofers."
According to the title page, Mr Briggs wrote 13 other books, namely:
Sound Reproduction.
Pianos, Pianists and Sonics.
Amplifiers.
High Fidelity.
Stereo Handbook.
A to Z in Audio.
Audio Biographies.
Cabinet Handbook.
More About Loudspeakers.
Audio and Acoustics.
Aerial Handbook.
Musical Instruments and Audio.
About Your Hearing.
/sreten.
