Open the door and the shelves come at you one after another, each set just far enough apart to take a sheet of music lying flat. Our newest arrival is an antique mahogany music cabinet, thirty-eight and a quarter inches tall and not quite eighteen wide, built somewhere between the turn of the century and the 1940s for a job the modern house has forgotten it ever had.
Before the radio and the record player took the work off their hands, families who wanted music made it themselves, and the piano bench was the busiest seat in the house. Tin Pan Alley pushed new songs out by the week, and they arrived as big floppy sheets that no bookshelf on earth was shaped to hold. So the furniture makers answered with this. A narrow case of shallow fixed shelves, sized to stand beside the piano and swallow a decade of sheet music without creasing a corner.
The proportions are the real pleasure of it. The top overhangs a little and carries a low raised gallery along the back, the front corners are softly rounded, and the whole case rides on four slender legs that taper the entire way to the floor. One door, one modest curved pull, and a footprint of seventeen and three quarter inches by fourteen. It asks for almost no floor and gives back a great deal of storage.
At the moment it is doing its old job and moonlighting at another. The shelves hold a run of Detroit News and Detroit Free Press front pages, MacArthur and Churchill among them, and near the bottom sits the sheet music for Queen High, the musical comedy that ran three hundred seventy-eight performances on Broadway in 1926. Empty, those same shelves will take records, linens, magazines, or all the paperwork that never quite finds a drawer.
Come see it in person at Pollyanna’s Antiques in downtown Mt. Clemens. We are open Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday from 10 to 4. The piano is up to you.