G'day again Foolestroupe/Robin,

I'm afraid the Itinerari d'immagini is a fairly local guidebook to the Italian collection ... Christiaan Dolislager picked up some copies while negotiating with Italian makers for his own branded piano accordions. I simply quoted it because it had good examples to reinforce the datings I have acquired by a long process of diffuse osmosis.

In re your pre-WW I piano accordion with minimal basses ... the least I have seen is 12 - sort of "Stradella", because they were vertically arrayed in fifths ... but the '10s and '20s were a period in which accordion bass ends were in a fair ferment. This is when the button accordion, generally, lost most of its complicated bass ends (until Hohner / Jimmy Shand grafted the full Stradella bass onto the "British Chromatic Accordion" [B/C/C#]) ... I could (just) believe almost anything might have happened in those decades!

Maccann (that is how Prof. Maccann always spelled his name) ... I can't really see much real relationship with the English Concertina beyond being another same-note-in and-out scheme. No other instrument on God's earth has ever emulated the Wheatstone scheme's alternation from hand to hand (and I have to work on my English ... acquired unbidden - but just as I need to look at some interesting possibilities of the system [Danny Spooner's chordal approach to English accompaniment] ... after I have restored it.)

Regards,

Bob