A Tale of Two Record Collections

[2Bdecided]

...or "in praise of the unloved!"


I was browsing another forum yesterday when I came across this sorry tale...

http://www.lesliegerber.net/writing/art ... o-of-2006/

The relevant parts...

The call came from an institution in the American midwest. Some years ago they had accepted the gift of a huge record collection. One of their trustees had engineered this transaction and assured them that the collection would be a tremendous acquisition for their institution.

But it wasn’t. It was actually irrelevant to their purpose, and they had no place to put it and no manpower to catalog it or even sort through it.

By figuring out the volume of the collection and extrapolating from a few boxes, they came to the conclusion that the collection was about 197,000 records. And by now all they hoped to do was avoid paying the large amount of money it would cost them to send the records to the dump.

(I've snipped the part where the man confirms that this is mostly a classical LP collection, and figures out how to transport the collection of LPs to him so he can sell them)

Meanwhile, the original donor of the records had learned that they were being given away and became incensed. He got my phone number and called me. I spoke with him for quite a while, and he eventually calmed down. He told me he had bought many record collections to keep them from being discarded. I told him I was now doing pretty much the same thing, and he agreed.

At this point, I have had the records for two weeks. We have gone through several dozen boxes. Nearly all of them have been 78s. It’s a sad fact that, these days, most 78s are completely useless and unsaleable. I don’t know as much about 78s as someone who deals in them, but since I’m not totally ignorant–and since I was desperate for space–I have been sorting through them. After a few days of sorting, I had a pile of albums that seemed to be of some potential interest, so I called a 78 expert I know and read them off to him. He approved about half of them. Roughly speaking, this means that about 5% of the 78s are worth preserving. The rest are going into the landfill, at my expense. I am actually dumping the records out of their albums and boxing them separately. The cardboard albums are recyclable without my having to pay the transfer station to accept them. The shellac will cost me a lot of money just to get rid of.

It almost makes coasters, or even riffle practice, seem a decent end in comparison.


However, I heard a much happier tale over lunch the other day...

A local university had decided to get rid of its extensive classical 78rpm collection (thousands of discs, rather than hundreds of thousands!) and intended to dump them all. One of the members of the local CLPGS section got to hear about it. He only owned a small car, but a couple who had just joined the group owned a much larger vehicle, and offered to help move them. The discs went to their house, where they sit in a spare bedroom. They know that they are not worth anything, and are happy to give some away to anyone who is interested, but as one of them said "it just seemed so wrong that these records had been collected and cared for so carefully by someone, and then were just going to be dumped". They have really got the collecting bug, and were really quite excited by the machines and records they had. It was lovely to bump into some people in the real world who are so enthusiastic about the hobby.

(I did mention to my wife that I'd met a couple where both halves were interested in gramophones. "Go and live with them then" was her not entirely joking reply. )


There probably are more classical 78s in the world than there will ever be people who want to listen to them, never mind own them and store them. I wonder though, if they keep doing to land fill, if we're not at risk of losing some of them forever a decade or so down the line - or being left with just scratched and worn copies of discs which once existed in abundance in mint condition.


My real passion on 78s is Jazz and Dance band music. I like a lot of classical music, but I’d rather listen to it live or on CD to maximise the enjoyment of the music itself. Even so, I keep quite a few classical 78 albums of music I quite like so that, maybe a couple of times a year, I can play some classical 78 sets in full to experience an evening of performances and recordings the way people did 80 years ago. It might not be the best way to experience that particular composition by Beethoven or Mozart for its own sake, but it's a unique experience overall. Performances that are as perfect as humanly possible in a series of five minute takes are quite a different experience from a digitally perfect CD which probably has an edit every 15 seconds to meet that level of perfection.

Cheers,
David.

P.S. When listening to classical album sets of a single work, I admit to often resorting to an auto changer where possible.

P.P.S. Even I cannot get worked up about the loss of late 1940s and later classical 78s that were just dubs from LPs or magnetic tape masters. In those cases, the 78s are just inferior copies and seem a little pointless even to me. I might just consider dumping those as an absolute last resort, but not yet.

[operabass78s]

As a collector of primarily classical works this pains me

[estott]

Many of Caruso's finest records were such big sellers that you can barely give them away - in fact that's how Victor distributed some, free with new machines.


The situation also applies to a lot of Big Band music. Most of the popular classics sold in huge numbers & are very common- and for just listening to the music a CD is easier and often better.

[2Bdecided]

I know, but the buyer on story one didn't even try to give the discs away.

[Orchorsol]

Horrific, whether the records were less desirable or not...

The University where I work had - at a guess - over five thousand classical 78s in the depths of their archive stores and wanted rid of them. It took them months of enquiries locally before they finally got onto me, not realising that I worked there, which was amusing - and by coincidence one other local collector at precisely the same time. So we had the pleasant task of going through them all (about 6 hours in total) deciding who should have what, ending up with about half each. Amazing, I'd never met him, but he's a friend now - and as it turns out has a Cascade gramophone! (A relative of EMGs and Experts.)

I'd say about 70% were post-WWII, & quite a lot of those from the magnetic tape and early LP era (so arguably, intrinsically undesirable) but there was plenty of rare and exciting stuff too. E.g. I don't think it's super-valuable but I now have a rare copy of Leslie Heward's amazing wartime premiere of E J Moerlan's Symphony, which really excites me - there were a lot of interesting "lesser composer" 78s.

All these had been moved a number of times, horribly (200 or more contained in a black plastic bag?!) and there were a lot of casualties... and they obviously hadn't been played for decades, maybe even since the collection was donated (I found a name, but no history of that is available). How sad, and how sadder still if they'd been dumped!

Happy ending - I am still going through them and enjoying them hugely - and at some point I will be taking one of my machines there and playing some to an audience. I'm looking forward to that - bringing them alive again!

[Lenoirstreetguy]

If a local collector hadn't come to the rescue, the vast majority of the 78 collection at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation....the national network...would have gone into the dumpster. Thousands of 78s complete with a card catalogue in several golden oak cabinets would now be moldering in the grave. The collection dated from 1934 to the end of the 78 period, that is to say about 1960. And since it was started in 1934 many records were recorded before that , it actually spanned the entire electrical era. AND the pressings were the best available, since quiet surfaces were of the essence for broadcast work.
And why were they given away? Because the current Tory federal government is cutting the CBC's budget to the bone and with the consolidation of vartious departments, they needed the space taken up by the cabinets of 78's.
Alas... alas ... alas..

JRT

[CptBob]

.....Because the current Tory federal government is cutting the CBC's budget to the bone and with the consolidation of vartious departments, they needed the space taken up by the cabinets of 78's.
Alas... alas ... alas..

A similar thing happened at the BBC to the LP and CD collection - arguably dafter. When I worked at HMV - sadly no longer with us, when you got someone in with the enquiry "I want something with the same feel as Carmina Burana but that's a different piece of music" you could put money it that was a BBC producer. At that time they hadn't closed down the record library, but they were charging a market rate £25 a time for loans, whereas CDs generally were around £15 to buy. They'd use our expertise rather than the librarians. I've no idea of the real facts and economics of what went on there, but the differential between borowing a library copy and buying new was so great and unfavourable. I suppose it depends on what proportion of the CDs bought were actually used. My CD and vinyl collections have many ex-BBC items and from the labels it looks as if many were never played.