In the Attic: Christmas Hymns & Carols

In 1946 Robert Shaw and his RCA Victor Chorale released a Christmas album. In those days an album was really an album, like a photo album with pages that you mounted photos on: You could only fit three or four minutes of sound on one side of a 78 rpm record, so they packaged a bound volume of three to six heavy envelopes with records inside.

By the time I came along, the long-playing record had changed all that, and Christmas Hymns and Carols had been converted to a 33.3 rpm LP. That was ...