Craftsmen

The Craftsmen series ran from approximately 1957-59, with a catalog numbering system of C-2001 through C-2062. Craftsmen was a short-lived 1950's subsidiary of Precision Radiation Instruments (PRI), Inc., who owned the Tops label. They also apparently owned Radio Craftsmen, a company that produced radio and hi-fi equipment, and the label gets its name from shortening "Radio Craftsmen." At the top left of the front and back of the album covers, there was a small logo which said "A Division of P.R.I." In fact, almost the entire Craftsmen catalog was made up of reissues of earlier Tops material, usually either by abridging the original album to 8-10 tracks (imagine that, a budget reissue of a budget label), or by "mixing-and-matching" tracks from several Tops albums to make a new one. For the mixed albums, the artists names were problems, so Craftsmen just came up with a new artist for the purpose. Many of the artists names on the Tops label were fictitious, anyway, as most were a collection of faceless Hollywood studio musicians. All the early album covers used a design where a circle was drawn inside the square shape of the jacket, and the photo was only visible inside the circle, rather like looking through a spyglass at an album cover.