Hebrew Publishing Company sheet music catalogue and price list

These turn-of-the century catalogs from a publisher of Yiddish sheet music take a maximalist approach to Victorian-era typography. There are 12 typefaces on the page by my count, some of them only used for one or two lines of text.

The Hebrew Publishing Company was founded by Joseph Werbelowsky in 1900, and published Jewish books, religious materials, and sheet music, becoming one of the most successful Jewish publishers in New York of the early 20th century. At the time, “Hebrew” was the preferred term for anything Jewish, and the Hebrew Publishing Company published materials in Yiddish and English as well as Hebrew. Much of the Yiddish in America then was printed in a very Germanized orthography — especially egregious here are the umlauts in “König” and “Schöne” (standard kinig/kenig and sheyne). This iteration of the catalog is taken from the back of their Potpourri of selected Hebrew melodies, a medley of 12 dance melodies and Hasidic nigunim arranged for piano.