Industrial heritage collection
The industrial heritage collection housed by the Klaverens Hus is the largest in its kind in Sweden. It consists of tools, machines, materials, patterns, drawings, photos, interviews with makers, workers and representatives of the dealers and other documentation from our piano and reed organ factories.
Much disappeared in connection with bankruptcies, removals and company reconstructions, sometimes also by selling abroad. The foreman, piano technician and tuner Nils Degertorp (1928-1994) who was in charge of the Malmsjö factory in Arvika in the last years before closing in 1977 has given a relation of how it happened that is worth considering: ‘When we shut down the production at Klässbol [outside Arvika] everything was dumped. Off it must! People from the Jahn piano factory bought some semi-manufactured products but otherwise most things were dumped. All the hand-made wooden models for cast iron frames, drilling and gluing patterns, all fine models that had cost thousands of crowns to make, all binders from old times with materials from all the music shops we had all over Sweden, everything was tossed away. Afterwards I went to the city dump and managed to save some binders but that was all. Generations of collected knowledge was shipped away. Terrible!’ (statement of summer 1991, interview by Hans Näslund).
Only scattered remnants of this rich world are preserved. Therefore it is important to save everything that is still left if so ‘only’ a set of tools used by a worker or a few photos of some of the factories. Finding the workers and tradition bearers who are still alive and catching the knowledge of life and work in the factories is at the last minute.
Minor industrial heritage collections are for example the J.P. Nyström family collection consisting of books for cuttings 1924-1939 and pictures from the factory work, and gifts from foreman Yngve Norrby, Gunnarskog, including a piano model, drawings for piano and a big aerial photograph of the Östlind & Almquist group of factory buildings in Arvika (1950s). Seven extensive collections are given presentations one by one:
The Conny Carlsson collection
The Baumgardt Piano Factory collection
The Herrljunga Piano and Reed Organ collection
The AB Förenade Piano- och Orgelfabriker collection
The Anton Almquist collection
The Martin Axelsson collection
S. Ljungqvists Orgelfabrik collection
