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Have you ever bought someone's record collection?


Dmitry

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This was a first for me. I was a winning bidder on a nice collection of about 150 titles, focused on the 1960s-1970s jazz, sold as one lot in a local auction house. I previously bought a high-end mid-1980s Pioneer Elite stereo system from this auction, in amazing condition, including a superb PL-90 turntable with a very good Signet cartridge . The auctioneer is an honest man, with good reputation in the area, and gets interesting things on a regular basis, mostly from surrounding estates, probate, and house cleaners.  
I wish I could meet the previous owner, if he is still living. He put together an interesting, forward-looking record collection, from which I keep drawing albums I've never heard, or heard of before. There were even three or four original Blue Note, and a few Actuel, Black Jazz Records titles, Just by flipping through, the collection titles start ca.1963, and end in about 1980. 

IMG_0424

 

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If you ever manage to come up with a list of all the titles — or even just all the artist names — please post it here! I’d be curious to see what all you came up with.

Dare I ask how much it set you back? I’m gonna wildly guess $230.  Maybe we should all guess, and see who comes closest.

Edited by Rooster_Ties
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No - BUT someone (actually several people) bought my vinyl collection 20+ years ago. Approx. 20,000 LPs total. Good old days when collectors (especially Japanese + a few US dealers) were paying good money. FWIW, the jackets on mine were in better shape than the boxes you showed.

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1 hour ago, Rooster_Ties said:

If you ever manage to come up with a list of all the titles — or even just all the artist names — please post it here! I’d be curious to see what all you came up with.

Dare I ask how much it set you back? I’m gonna wildly guess $230.  Maybe we should all guess, and see who comes closest.

I’ll post some group shots as I clean them.

Price was a fair bit more than you wrote, but not in the “damn high” range.

A couple of the titles are the dreaded ‘remastered for stereo’ , indicating that the owner started buying in the very late 1960s-early 1970s. 

32 minutes ago, jlhoots said:

FWIW, the jackets on mine were in better shape than the boxes you showed.

These haven’t been played in decades: the jackets are really dusty, no outer poly sleeves. Probably sat in a dry cellar or basement for a long time, before being auctioned off. Luckily, I don’t spy any mold. Condition of the sides I played is quite nice. At one time the owner put some of the records in inner poly sleeves, the kind that’s not being made any more.

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R-3968722-1350860596-5063.jpeg.jpg

I have actually been offered two different LP collections, one by someone's daughter and another by someone's widow. I only took what I needed, figuring there might be someone else interested in the remaining LPs. If I had taken the whole collections, the remainder would have been donated to Goodwill or dumped. Condition was varied, I get the idea that some of the LPs had been purchased used and others exposed to less than ideal conditions. But I learned never to turn down an opportunity to look at such collections, in addition to expected Dixieland and big band music, one of them had a Stuff Smith LP on 20th Century Fox.

Edited by Ken Dryden
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33 minutes ago, Dmitry said:

Price was a fair bit more than you wrote, but not in the “damn high” range.

How many bidders were you up against?

Since it was just a local auction, I had visions of you really getting a steal. In fact, until I looked again a second time (and saw it was local), I was gonna guess more like $400.

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The issue with my buying a collection at this point in my life is that there would likely be little of interest in it to justify the asking price or bid. I've also had very limited success trying to sell LPs unless they are in top condition or somewhat rare in and in demand. That said, I sold a Concord LP of The Ray Brown Trio Featuring Gene Harris - Soular Energy for $40 on Discogs a few months ago. It shocked me how much the average price was for it on Discogs at the time I listed it. 

Edited by Ken Dryden
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Have not, and would not want to do so at this point in life - I'm trying to clear out my vinyl, have been able to sell about half the jazz titles here.  Storage space is an issue, as is not having a living situation which is conducive to playing vinyl.

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I was given a large collection a few years back. It was one of those, "My son left a bunch of records in his room and he doesn't want them." I said, "Sure"... what could it hurt? They were all classic rock LPs from the 70s. Nearly every big name rocker, the Stones, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin. The problem? They were beat to death. The guy either played them 100's of times, had a beat up turntable or he really didn't handle them carefully. There were probably about 400 records in the pile. I kept a handful that actually played without skipping and took the rest to the dump where they belonged. :)

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On 1/15/2022 at 0:57 PM, Rooster_Ties said:

How many bidders were you up against?

Since it was just a local auction, I had visions of you really getting a steal. In fact, until I looked again a second time (and saw it was local), I was gonna guess more like $400.

I don't know, I bid on the phone. I saw photos of some of the LPs, and there were some BN titles, which  obviously sparked my interest [i.e. "Here's that Holy Grail I deserve to have!"]. I'm sure I wasn't the only one, because someone else was there and wanted them, which proved to be lucrative for the auction house and the consigner. The BNs turned out to be Liberty and UA era, aside from a couple of pre-1966 originals [I'll tell you which ones, once I go through them]. Yet there still was some seminal music there. Here's a sampling. 

51825430203_4fb48b282d_b.jpg

 

 

 

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I bought collections for two times. 

The first occasion was when I was about 15,16 years old and some kid from school told me there is a lady who will emigrate to Brazil and sells her record collection. 
I bought a lot of it, it was much electric Miles, Ornette, Sun Ra and Sanders (Live at the East), most of the stuff was avantgarde to electric. 
But the funniest thing was that I liked what I saw, I mean the lady who was maybe 26-29 years old. I thought: She looks fine, she listens to jazz, and the only thing I can do is buy her records......:(

The second occasion was a sad one. My live long friend Cristi, who shared my passions for jazz and for fly fishing, had died due to pancreatic cancer, agravated by  live long heavy drinking, and his widow sold me anything I wanted from his collecton, for only 1 Euro each CD....

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I've once bought a collection (or, realistically speaking, the remainder of it). In 2005 I scored a few jazz 78s on eBay, missed a couple of others, and then the seller (living about 130 miles from me) asked me if I'd be interested in buying the entire remaining stock. It was approx. 500 78s, largely from the 40s and virtually all of them US pressings (judging by some boxes the records came in the orignal owner must have bought a lot from Ray Avery and similar sellers in the 70s and 80s), about half of it jazz (swing and early modern, and many items on indie labels, one quarter R&B and one quarter 40s U.S. pop, most of which still sits in a fleamarket crate ;)) So I took the plunge and bought the entire lot at close to 3 euros per 78 after inspection on site and after I had figured out that the items I considered of interest alone would work out at a fair price per item for me. But really it was sheer madness and probably only happened because the offer came along at a moment when I was in a "buying mood".

I've also bought armloads of records from collections that were being sold off by the heirs of the original owners on a couple of occasions (in one case the collection occupied the walls of several rooms, although it had already been picked over at an earlier sales date :o) but these won't count here ...

Seeing the kind of collections a local secondhand record store still gets in from time to time there still must be interesting estate finds out there and I've sometimes wondered what it would be like if you'd be able to scoop up such collections at a "collector purchase" price which very likely would be higher for the seller than what a "dealer purchase" price is. But common sense prevails (particularly now that I have passed the 60 mark ^_^) and I am running out of shelf space again anyway ... So now I am glad I never followed up the lead given to me by a local record dealer about 15-20 years ago about a 12,000-LP jazz record collection (described as "oldtime jazz", which judging by the jazz interests of that dealer might have meant "oldtime and swing"). But since that collection was for sale some 400-500 miles from here I thought it better not wanting to find out ... ;)

 

Edited by Big Beat Steve
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  • 3 months later...

Here's a great story about a record collection as legacy: 

https://waltermagazine.com/art-and-culture/lasting-legacy-veola-mclean-record-collection/?utm_campaign=later-linkinbio-sorrystate&utm_content=later-26564165&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkin.bio&mc_cid=a326bd8ab7&mc_eid=2606b5c732

Local store owner bonds with a collector over a shared passion in education, so the store owner buys the lot (over 5,000 LPs) and sales proceeds go to a scholarship fund. :tup

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On 1/16/2022 at 7:35 PM, bresna said:

I was given a large collection a few years back. It was one of those, "My son left a bunch of records in his room and he doesn't want them." I said, "Sure"... what could it hurt? They were all classic rock LPs from the 70s. Nearly every big name rocker, the Stones, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin. The problem? They were beat to death. The guy either played them 100's of times, had a beat up turntable or he really didn't handle them carefully. There were probably about 400 records in the pile. I kept a handful that actually played without skipping and took the rest to the dump where they belonged. :)

I have also received LPs that were beat to death - but the covers of the LPs were in good shape.  So I threw out the LPs and used the covers of the LPs to decorate a few rooms.  The cover of The Sound of Jazz LP (the album with Count Basie, Billie Holiday, The Jimmy Giuffre Trio. etc.) is on the wall of my office.

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I'd like to buy a collection in order to feed the habit... seems like the ideal scenario. I have certainly pointed store owners to collections that would have cost more cash than I had on hand. Of course it has gotten more challenging now that everyone has access to Discogs, Popsike/Gripsweat, etc.. Still, being able to make several hundred or a few grand and put that towards something I was more interested in... sounds fun.

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