I LOVE ancient trumpet texts. I especially love their insanely long titles. The Winner’s New School for the Cornet is subtitled “In which the instructions are so clearly and simply treated, as to make it unnecessary to require a teacher. For practice, more than 150 operatic and popular airs are added, forming a complete collection of the best melodies of the day.”

Wow, long title! I will say that I had a blast working on this book. I had the opportunity to spend the day in the rare book room of University of Victoria where I was able to scan this first edition from 1869. It was a tiny booklet, seemingly to be used by school ages people and thrown in a bag or cornet case. The pages were disintegrating as I turned them and I did my best to preserve it as much as possible.

When I got the scans home I was able to clean them up to near perfection, then create a new edition with two originals per 8.5 x 11 page, turing the 64 page booklet into a 35 page study book as we would use it today.

I am happy to save a great piece of history like this from extinction, it shows us where we have come from and draws a clear lineage to the trumpet methods we use to this day.

You can grab some samples to the left then get an immediate PDF download above. Enjoy!