And yet it seems that there is no mystery, really, and Album O is in fact a shared album — perhaps because there were not enough Rashoff photos to make an album of twelve images, let alone enough to fill a catalogue of extras?
In any case, Larry Farrell appears in Album 0 with Ken Rashoff, which makes both standalone albums variety (rather than solo) efforts.
I still find Mizer’s catalog system confusing. :\
ReplyDeleteHis brother must have pulled his own hair out dealing with all the orders for thousands of different models. I would have told Bob you’re on your own in this endevour.
:)
-Rj
This was at the very beginning of the studio, and as complicated as the system certainly was, it was enormously flexible and capable of managing what, even in 1946, was evidently going to be a huge inventory.
DeleteI think what makes it seem absurdly Byzantine is the loss of the key — in order: A-Z, ZA-ZZ, YA-YZ, XA-XZ, WA-WZ, VA-VZ, UA-UZ, TA-TZ, SA-SZ, RA-RQ … when the series code was dropped. Starting with YB, every model had a unique code (sometimes more than one, confusingly), which allowed a new convention and led to entries like YE 10 LM. One sees with Ed Holovchik/Ed Fury the perils of the old system, since Mizer took so many photos of Ed that he was running out of numbers to use, and so he switched to the supremely awkward ZZ 0 __ approach, a hybrid of the 1946-51 and the post-1951 arrangement.
All that said, it is explicable, and a pretty elegant solution to a vast and growing inventory of images and models.