James Barron

“Philately is exacting. It demands an eye and a memory for details, for the intricacies of designs, for tiny differences between one batch of stamps and another.”
― James Barron, The One-Cent Magenta: Inside the Quest to Own the Most Valuable Stamp in the World

“Steinway made its soundboards with eastern white spruce until the 1920s. Today the remaining spruce trees in the East cannot provide boards long enough, or wide enough, for pianos. “That’s all logged out,” Albrecht says flatly. And, while Steinway can glue boards together vertically (with the grain), as it does for the rims, it cannot do so horizontally (against the grain). So, long before Albrecht came on the job, Steinway had gone west and found the Tebbs. Steinway adopted the northwestern spruce from twenty-five hundred miles away, where gnarly roots serve as an anchor in soil so wet that logging is often an amphibious proposition.”
― James Barron, Piano: The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand