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In Reply to: Goodwill is good to me (what I got while unattended.... ) posted by Dick Laurent on December 15, 2005 at 22:01:24:
You are in deep trouble, my brother. This is exactly the sort of activity that got me where I am today - with 20,000 lp's and many more 45's, 78's, etc.I got to the point, back in the 1970's, that if it was flat, circular and had a hole in the middle, I would buy it. I figured that at least one song on every record would be worth playing. I was wrong, over, and over, and over.
What sort of brought me to my senses was going to a local estate auction of someone that had, according to the listing "a lot of records". This was a huge understatement. There were dozens and dozens of large boxes of records each holding 100 or so albums. This was somebody that had moved from California to Kansas years ago and had shipped all of these records with him. Now his stuff was being sold off and it was only bringing a few dollars per box. I only had a couple of hours to browse the records before the auction started, and I finally gave up in frustration. There were so many and were so tightly packed, that it was nearly impossible to even look at what was there. They didn't seem to be organized at all, either. I only bought a few of the boxes, that did have a couple of records in them I wanted, but left feeling that I should have bought them all and sorted it out later. However, this started me thinking that I owned more records than were in that auction, and that I really had a large white elephant on my hands. The fear that someday all of my valuable records would be sold off for pennies each, lead me to start selling many of the better ones in Goldmine and Discographies and other magazines for record collectors.
Now I am still in the same situation, but rue selling so many of my best records. I am 20 years older and still wonder what will happen to my collection, and that I don't want to leave the "mess" for my young wife to deal with. And yet, I continue to buy more and more records.
Sick, I tell you, I am sick!!!
Good luck my friend, you will need it.
Dick Schneiders
Follow Ups:
Henry
I know exactly how you feel! BUT, the great thing is how easy it is to improve your collection. You have to get the mind-set that you have good records and not-so-good records. You never listen to the not-so-good records so why keep them?The argument I put forth is that someone may come over and want to hear something from a group or individual whom I don't care for, but I'll have it for them!
It never happens! Or at least so rarely it doesn't matter! It's your collection, you have to be satisfied with it. A large collection will have SOME LP that a friend wouldn't mind hearing, maybe not that ABBA album he loved and never replaced with a CD, but SOMETHING that he'd enjoy listening to!
I've been relatively ruthless in the last year or so, I buy only the really good stuff for myself and the better stuff for friends I meet here at AA. They might want some of the more easlily found LPs because where they live, there's NOTHING to find! But I no longer buy the Eagle's "Hotel California" or Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours", those can be found at any used record store in the world...and at reasonable prices.
Meanwhile, you're buying only the great stuff, culling the stuff from your collection that has music you don't really care for; improving the collection! 10,000 of the best stuff you've ever found, I assure you, is a better collection than 20,000 of the "this is interesting, I should get this to round out my Hank Waterbug collection".
Part of collecting is pride of ownership. Someone "in the know" comes to visit and begins looking at your collection. Ten minutes go by and he says, "Wow, you have this?", then another 5 minutes before he says, "This is a great record, isn't it?"
I like this scenario much better:
A friend "in the know" comes to visit and every record he pulls out he moans; he pulls out record after record and moans loudly with each one he sees. Ten minutes go by and he says, "I can't look any more, I'm going to be sick! Where the hell did you find all this stuff!"A small collection (by our standards) of nothing but the very best is more impressive for others...and far more importantly, to you!
There's only one problem. By any one collector's standards, there are still more LPs in this world that are "great" than any of us could ever own. Thus, all I've written is a lot of bullshi*!
I have gone through similar thought processes several times over the years. I have attempted to cull out records, with the intent of ridding myself of some. While I am able to move them from my primary record shelves into boxes, I can never seem to move them on to somebody else. A lot of it is, as you say, in case somebody comes over and asks for My Name Is Barbara, for example. However, that also is very rare for me. What is more common is somebody in one of these forums will mention some obscure record, and I will have it and be able to discuss it. This is exciting and fun to me. The problem comes down to my not really knowing which records this might happen with. My tastes and others, even yours, can be hugely different and diverse. Also, my tastes do change. Case in point, the Nick Drake box set I mentioned in the other discussion. I really didn't like the sound of his voice or the depression in most of his songs. After keeping the box set for many years, and never listening to it more than the first time, I sold it for an excellent price to somebody in New Zealand. Since then, Nick Drake has been mentioned a few times in forums, and I have heard some of his music here and there, and I now wish I still had that box set. There are a lot of records that I have sold, that I wish I now had, but most of them were ones that had a large value as collectors items, and the music, if not the exact album, is somewhat readily available. Also, I at least recorded them on reel-to-reel before I sold them. However, the ones I didn't like, like Nick Drake, I didn't even record.I don't want to make that mistake again. The obvious garbage, like 1001 strings or Mantovani's Greates Hits, nobody would want anyway. I could take them to the thrift stores, but then I would have to paw through all of them trying to find something worthwhile. And, horrors, what if I ended up buying one of my own records back again!
This place is aptly named, and I feel very lucky to have discovered it a few months ago. I finally have found someplace where I belong, and it is an asylum, like my wife kept telling me I would end up in.
Dick Schneiders
Hey! I have a lot of Barbara Streisand! My wife likes her and I want to keep her on my side with regard to my record collecting. After all, she did buy me a VPI record cleaning machine for my birthday.
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