Columbia Records Pressing Plant, Oakland

Pressing plant in Oakland, CA, operated by Columbia from 1926 to at least mid-1936. On the occasion of Columbia's purchase of the facility, The Talking Machine World of September 15, 1926 described it, as follows: "The property, which contains approximately 73,000 square feet of ground space on Fifty-seventh avenue, off East Fourteenth street, is in the Oakland industrial district." The plant produced pressings for sale west of the Rockies. Its labels use a serif typeface (12 point Century Expanded) for song titles. In contrast, the Bridgeport plant used at first a different serif typeface for song titles (12 point No. 2) but then replaced this with a smaller, non-serif typeface, 10 point Gothic Condensed No. 1, starting in 1927. Oakland pressings show the small center rings introduced in 1924 until at least February 1931. They also continued to use Royal Blue shellac, which Bridgeport pressed only through 1935, until about mid-1936.