As a collector of CDs, sometimes I fantasize about coming across an old collection that’s up for sale, one with lots of old and rare CDs in it, along with CDs that I would also want to listen to. I’ve read about people having experiences like that – they’re not common at all. But Sunday, I was fortunate enough to have one of my own.
I had planned to visit my local flea market that day to check out and maybe buying a dart set for fun. I have a board set up in my garage, but I don’t seem to have any darts anymore. So I visited the booth with the darts and because there was only one set available, I decided to hold off another week until he got his order with different models. My flea market doesn’t have a resident “CD guy”, so I don’t stop in very often. But I did feel like getting some walking in, so I wandered the halls.
I found a couple of temporary sellers with CDs, but their selection was terrible and in poor condition. Another seller had like 10 CDs out. Sigh. But, leaving that seller’s stand, I saw a booth across the hall with a couple of larger CD racks. I went over to see what was there. Within 10 seconds of browsing the rack, I could tell this was a personal collection. There were items there that I never see anywhere else. In one rack, there was almost the entirety of the IRS NoSpeak series, something I had completed this year. I could have saved quite a bit of money, here.
Alas, I didn’t find anything in the two front racks, but when I stood back up and actually looked in the booth, there were six more racks and a couple of boxes of CDs. Oh my god, if it’s all the quality of what’s out front, I’m in trouble.
And without dragging it out, yes, it was and, yes, I was. There were two criteria I was working with at this booth. The first was looking for stuff I wanted (duh). The second was looking for any smooth-sided cases, which would indicate early CD pressings. In the first criteria, I found maybe 6 CDs. However, when it came to smooth cases, this collector was seriously an early adopter. I was pulling out CDs 2-3 at a time and stacking them up into multiple piles.
The total at the end was 62 CDs. The lady charged me a whopping $55 and even was willing to take a credit card when I explained I didn’t have enough cash to cover the purchase. I was willing to do PayPal or some other method to avoid her getting a fee, but ok. She was very happy to move so many of the CDs at once, and I was very pleased with what I had pulled out.
Back at home, I stacked the CDs all up and began cleaning the cases.
After cleaning them, which took a little over half an hour, I had to step away to let my mind think about what I had to do. I broke the incoming items into three piles: things that were duplicates of what I already had (and might be upgrades), things I definitely wanted to add to the collection, and the rest was going to have to be evaluated to see if I wanted to keep it. I ended up with 20 definite adds, 6 or so dupes, and the rest was left for later. Then I had to take another break.
What we’re talking about here is listening to 50+ albums. Even being really aggressive about it, listening to one CD on the way to work, one on the way back, and maybe one at night, we’re still talking almost a month of new music. And listening to an album once isn’t always fair when choosing to keep it or not, and I do want to be fair. That means a whole lot of music has been dropped into my life.
And that quantity of music is overwhelming. Believe it or not, I haven’t listened to any of it yet. You would think I would have immediately popped in a CD coming back from the flea market, but I was too shocked at my fortune. When you have over 60 albums to listen to, where do you start? The genres are all over the place, so I could get anything, really. What a first world problem.
I pulled out the 20 albums that were on the must have list and got them logged into my Discogs account. It put my collection’s Max total over $20k. Obviously that’s highly optimistic, but it’s still a milestone. I compared the dupes in my collection to the newcomers and only swapped one out. The other 5 have to get compared and posted on my other blog. So I have plenty of things to do ahead of me next week.
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