"Ansell, Bishop & Turner window display. 1920." A Victrola dealer in Washington, D.C., puts Nipper in the game. View full size. National Photo Co. glass negative.
I keep a small group for Nipper pictures on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/groups/nipper/), inspired by the big Nipper statue that still sits atop a local warehouse building. But this is the most amazing Nipper pic I've seen.
Submitted by MabelNormand on Sat, 07/26/2008 - 6:41pm.
I love anything about Victrola and his master's voice. I got chills the first time I heard the explanation of the logo. Nipper hears his master's voice through the victrola.... and he's sitting on his master's coffin. Freaky.
In the seventies, a man I worked with had a huge collection of antique phonographs and associated memorabilia. I recall that he had at least a hundred (maybe 200 hundred) Nipper figurines, ranging in size from inch high china versions, to one that must have been 5 feet tall.
I shudder to think what they would be worth today
Submitted by Jim from TN on Fri, 07/25/2008 - 10:11am.
How much is that 160.55 in today's dollars? Thousands I'd guess. Speaiung of which, I'd love to have just a dozen or so of those little Nippers to sell on eBay!
I was in the retail electronics & appliance business for many years starting in the 1950's. For all of those 50-something years we were RCA dealers and had great contacts at the factory level. In the 1980's RCA introduced a product called the Capacitance Electronic Disc or CED movie player. It was a forerunner of DVD and competition to the struggling LaserDisc movie players being marketed by Philips and Pioneer.
I was in business in Midtown Manhattan at the time and we were a state-of-the-art shop for this type of product. I received a call from an RCA sales manger asking if it was OK for him, some other RCA executives and a network television crew (I sort of remember CNN) to come to the store for a news broadcast announcing the release of the RCA CED player. Naturally, I agreed.
Along with the RCA executives and the camera crew was a woman carrying the current real live Nipper. It took a couple of hours to get the shoot done. The dog would get a little frisky every once in a while and the woman would pull a handkerchief from her pocket that must have been soaked in some sort of narcotic and she would hold it over the dog's face until he was half asleep. I don't think they'd try that stunt today without having PETA all over them.
The CED player never really caught on and LaserDisc just about disappeared when DVDs appeared in the 1990's.
Submitted by stanton_square on Fri, 07/25/2008 - 9:03am.
This record store was at 1221 F street NW, in the same block as previously seen Saks Fur. Ansell, Samuel H. Bishop and Charles J. Turner acquired the business in 1919 from "Mssrs. Cohen & Hughes, Inc." Apparently they spent more time on window displays than on running the business as the store went into bankruptcy in February 1926.
Submitted by Laura Brown on Fri, 07/25/2008 - 3:31am.
Interesting trivia (or not): Here in the UK, a stylised version of Nipper is still used to advertise the HMV chain of record shops. (HMV stands for "His Master's Voice"; it used to be a record label, but now just runs stores). Some more background on Nipper and how he came to advertise various companies can be found here.
