Record Hoard

[Garret]

Ironically, some of those records in the basement might be easier to reach now. If you can believe it, I found a scarce Pasquale Amato Fonotipia amidst the mildewed records in the basement...!

Zeppy, have you gone through your finds yet...? Depending on what you are looking for, we might be able to do some trading!

[Zeppy]

Ironically, some of those records in the basement might be easier to reach now. If you can believe it, I found a scarce Pasquale Amato Fonotipia amidst the mildewed records in the basement...!

Zeppy, have you gone through your finds yet...? Depending on what you are looking for, we might be able to do some trading!

I've managed to clean and catalog about 25 records. 20 from the upstairs, and 5 from the basement. So far it's been 3 Pathé... and 20 12 inch Victors, mostly classical (a few Paderwski and a Caruso or two were what came to mind). So I really haven't even made a dent. I don't think I've found anything ground braking, but slowly going through.

And even after sitting on the porch for a few days, and being washed, the ones from the basement still have a funk to them. They're currently in a box with some baking soda...hopefully that will cut some of the stank.

[bigshot]

I got a batch of about a thousand records like that once. They had been kept on a porch under a tarp for years. White vinegar cleaned them and made them smell ok.
When I cleaned them up, they looked fine, but when I played them, I discovered that mold had pitted the grooves and made the surface noise bad. That smell is the mold.

[Curt A]

If you look carefully in that 3rd to the last picture, how did you guys miss those Berliner records stuck in an album...?

[Marco Gilardetti]

Some years ago I helped my then-girlfriend's parents clear the house of a deceased relative, which was much like the one you describe Marco - horrific. Curiously, there was some valuable 1950s audio equipment which I helped them sell (although I would have loved some of it myself), but no records!

Most probably, this implies that the amplifiers did not belong to him, but where picked up from somewhere at a point.

Even though to no avail, I really think that this family should have given you the amps in change of the help that you gave them, even more so as they didn't know what to do with them, and eventually decided to resell the units.

[ALVES]

I am amazed that they will pull a house down with all the stuff in it .Not to sort it out is odd .

You never know what treasures can be hidden in such a hoard of stuff other than the records .

[Marco Gilardetti]

Agree. That's something you would never see in Italy, should you even live eternally. First of all, 99% of houses are built in bricks/stones, which are expensive materials, so they're usually restructured rather than torn down. It's extremely unlikely to see a house in the nieghborhood being torn down here, and as a matter of fact in never happened to me. Secondarily, an increasingly worrying percentage of people lives on unsufficient wages and can't wait for some "far relative" to die in order to inherit his/her goods. Should the house be sold or rented, in any case they would go through all of the stuff and resell at flea markets whatever is worth a penny. As an Italian, a house torn down with thousands of records inside would be absolutely beyond my most fervent imagination.

In any case, I agree that the sir we're talking about seemed to be more a collector with interests in many different fields than a plain hoarder, and as such some of the items that we still see over there may be indeed valuable. For instance, those toy spaceships are just garbage to me, because I know nothing about them and have no interest in having them in my home, but maybe they're highly collectable vintage toys that an expert of the field would pay big bucks for. (Perhpas they're lurking this thread and they're laughing at us rushing to the house to save stupid useless 78s and leaving there the $10K holy grail of all collectors ACME Interstellar Spaceship...)

[ALVES]

Yes , It would never happen here in UK either .

[EarlH]

Not very many construction companies want to deal with the liability here in the US. Once the property has been turned over to them for demolition, they are really apprehensive about letting anyone (knowingly) on a property to remove anything. And that's not something recent. I tried to get some stained glass windows out of a house that was being torn town 35 years ago. I asked while they were getting ready to go on lunch break and it wouldn't have taken my half an hour to get them out. And that was the answer I got. Then the guy got into his backhoe and smashed all the windows out of that side of the house in case I had any bright ideas while they were off eating lunch! I've had a few other contractors pretty much tell me the same thing since then, especially when it's a huge mess. One of the hazards of living in a litigious society I suppose.

[edisonplayer]

A treasure trove-lost FOREVER!!! Supposing a copy of the very scarce King Oliver Gennett of "Zulu's Ball" was in there?edisonplayer