The Ryan's Mammoth Collection was first published in 1882 by Elias Howe in Boston, with William Bradbury Ryan as the editor. It contains 1050 tunes, mostly in a very concise, two-line format. It uses very few ornaments, though bowing suggestions are frequent. It was very popular for several decades, and was even sold through the Sears catalog in the 1890's and later. Publication ceased around 1910, as Howe's sons got out of the music publishing business.

In 1940, Cole (New York) published a somewhat abbreviated and reorganized edition called 1000 Fiddle Tunes. It gave no credit at all to the original editor or publisher, but detailed comparisons show that it was a reprint made from the same plates. Both books have become primary sources of tunes by folk musicians in the British Isles and North America. There is a (wire-bound!) edition, edited by Patrick Sky and published by Mel Bay, which contains a great deal of interesting history. Serious students of traditional Irish and Irish-American music will want a copy. Here is a list of online sources. If you know of others, send me email.

The Ryan/Cole books don't number the tunes, so we can't use tune numbers to reserve blocks of tunes. What I'm trying here is: Pick a single page of tunes, check with the tune list, and transcribe the tunes on that page that haven't yet been done. Cole rearranged the pages, so the pages of the two books don't have any special correspondence. But the order of tunes was mostly kept, and you'll find that overlaps are mostly either at the top or bottom of a page. If you find a tune that's missing here, you should transcribe it on your own machine, and send it to me.

Here are the guidelines that we used in making these transcriptions. Much of it was blatantly lifted from the O'Neill's Project that most of us were part of earlier. There were some things in Ryan/Cole that didn't quite match the current ABC notation, but we got most of it. The remaining problems were a few things such as fingerings that may be standardized some day. We mostly just used the "chord" notation for this, since Ryan/Cole didn't include chords..

Here are the things we have now:

• List the tunes from individual contributors.
• All the tunes in the collection.
• Sets of the tunes in the collection, to make downloading easier.