I bought my first 'fakebook' when I was 18 years old in 1956. I remember going
up to London and finding a seedy-looking music shop which sold me, for £10,
a book called '1000 Show Tunes', clearly not a fully legal
transaction. That was two week's wages, then, so don't baulk at paying $35
today. That particular book is still available (if a bit dated) but the
publishers have revamped the order of tunes so I've not included it in my
compilation.
I know that other web sites have larger combined indexes than mine (e.g.
www.seventhstring.co.uk) but I don't know of anywhere that includes page
numbers, and this seems to me of such obvious value that I'm making mine
available.
November 2009: Several books have some 'unnumbered' pages at the front (cover
sheets or the index itself). In PDF versions this means that the page number
understood by Adobe is slightly different from the number quoted in the book's
index (which I used). So I'm now giving two page numbers with each reference.
If you have the printed book then use the first number to look up the song. If
you have the PDF version, use the second number. (N.B. the later numbers in
the GigBook index are nonsense).
This composite index covers over 4000 songs with 6400 references.
If you want the full index, Email me. The following abbreviations are used in
the output: