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You're being too hard on him, John ;-)

I quote Wikipedia (all bold emphases below are mine BTW):
From the 16th century, following French practice, the apostrophe was used when a vowel letter was omitted either because of incidental elision ("I'm" for "I am") or because the letter no longer represented a sound ("lov'd" for "loved"). English spelling retained many inflections that were not pronounced as syllables, notably verb endings ("-est", "-eth", "-es", "-ed") and the noun ending "-es", which marked either plurals or possessives, also known as genitives. . . An apostrophe followed by "s" was often used to mark a plural; specifically, the Oxford Companion to the English Language notes that

There was formerly a respectable tradition (17th to 19th centuries) of using the apostrophe for noun plurals, especially in loanwords ending in a vowel (as in ... Comma's are used, Philip Luckcombe, 1771) and in the consonants s, z, ch, sh, (as in waltz's and cotillions, Washington Irving, 1804)... [also BTW for letter plurals - A's, B's, etc. - and number plurals - 1's, 2's. etc.]
Maybe this audiophile guy was also into Washington Irving? Hence, "The Fritz's"! ;-)

In any case (and contrary to what The Oxford Companion to the English Language indicates!), this type of usage did not completely die out in the 19th century, and even survives in the names of some of our 21st-century sports teams, where the apostrophe is clearly being used to form the plural, not the possessive:



As for your own surname, I can understand why "Markses" might be preferable to "Marks's" to indicate the plural, although maybe you ought to try the latter sometime - you might actually grow to like it! ;-)


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