BACK IN THE ’90s, when I was publishing record collectors price guides with Krause Publications, I started working on a book tentatively titled INTRODUCTION AND GUIDE TO RECORD COLLECTING. I intended it to have 100 mini-chapters on various aspects of collecting—from learning to identify original pressings and knowing the difference between a reproduction and a bootleg, to how-to’s on buying and selling at collectors conventions.
It was to be one hundred mini-chapters because 1) I wanted it to be an easy book to pick up and read any chapter in a few minutes, and 2) because so many collectors seem to have difficulty reading anything but the entries in a price guide.
The first chapter that I wrote was Chapter 69, because it was the easiest (and I thought the funniest). It was going to be about the lack of females in the hobby of record collecting.
Here it is in its entirety between the two horizontal lines:
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Chapter 69
How to Meet Girls at Record Collectors Convention
You don’t.
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On the serious side, Chapter 70 would have been suggestions on how guys selling records at shows should behave to young women looking through their records. This meant girls who were obviously not just there with their boyfriends, but actually collecting records.
I heard a lot about this from those young ladies because: 1) I was always there with a female companion, 2) I was usually perceived as “older” than most of the other sellers, and 3) my Mommy and my Daddy raised me to be so damn polite all the time!
Those factors made me seem ‘safer’ than the younger males at the shows. So several of these ‘girl’ collectors opened up to me: mostly they complained about the treatment they received from other (male) sellers.
You know, they were arsewholes …
Oh well and that’s that and that was then and this is now and this is all of that book that I have remembered!
PS: Being record collectors, we all thought that if any girls showed up, they would look like Betty Page or Farrah Fawcett or Nicole Kidman …
Nicole Kidman as the sexy-as-all-getout (never understood that phrase intellectually but always got it on other levels) witch in Practical Magic, a fun movie that also stars Sandra Bullock as the less glamorous sister witch. These two are backed up by Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest as their auntie witches and Aidan Quinn as a good guy cop. Check it out, if only to see Ms Kidman as a redhead …
this is very funny neal, may i please have your permission to include it in my very popular thread on RCG entitled “how to find good records”? i’ll give you and your site a credit for it.
Certainly. In fact, you can reprint anything of mine any time you want—just give me credit, make certain there is a link to my site (I need more than you and Nondisposablejohnny as regular readers), and if you’re gonna edit it, please let me know in advance.
Berni and I spent an hour at Firestone yesterday waiting for a new tire to be delivered there and we were forced (!) to watch television. Some show about antique pickers who were nothing like any pickers I ever met. I mentioned to B that one the chapters for my INTRODUCTION AND GUIDE TO RECORD COLLECTING was going to be about ‘pickers.’
I was going to suggest that many lower-tier ‘dealers’ would be happier and actually make more money if they were pickers supplying dealers with inventory rather than going through all the rigamarole of setting up a table at a convention every few months.
Is there anything more demoralizing in record collecting than spending a 10-12 hours at a show, sell nothing, then have to lug a thousand LPs home?
That made me remember Chapter 69 …
ty neal, i also owned a antique store so i know a little about stuff other than records. my only regret was not getting into antiques much earlier. those picker guys are clueless, they’re going to places and paying too much for items that have been passed over by smart buyers years before.
Yeah, those two guys on TV were paying 50-60% of what they said the items were worth (they coulda been lying) and keeping some. That made them what I call “accumulators” (pre-collectors), not pickers. Pickers pay about 5-10% then turn the stuff over for the next day.
In 1978, I found a store in Pennsylvania that had thousands of mono promo LPs from the ’60s in their basement. They sold them to me 3/$1.00. I took them to a couple of stores in NYC and got $3-5 apiece. The shops put out them out for $15-30. We were all happy.
I’ve found it interesting all these years that the hobby is so male dominated. I wondered if there really weren’t that many female record collectors, or maybe there were but for whatever reason they didn’t like the boys’ club atmosphere that a lot of these shows might have had.
Having said that, I’ve noticed the variety of people (thankfully both male and female) who buy records nowadays has increased somewhat. To me, that’s wonderful. The more diversity, the better.
Thanks for posting this. Always a treat reading stuff on your blogs.
MACKDADDYG
First, this one went directly to SPAM, but your other post (below) did not. Go figger.
We men can spread our love around: we love our wife or girlfriend (or boyfriend); we love our fave sports team (the Phillies forever for me); we love our fave beer (Ballantine India Pale Ale back in the ’60s and ’70s before the recipe or the brewing process was changed; we love our records (you don’t wanna get me started listing my faves here); etc.
Chicks, well, they tend to love one thing with everything. If it’s you or me, lucky us.
Now that I got the macho schidt outta the way, when I lived in California, it was always funny going to the shows. In the Bay Area, it was guys and their wives came with them.
In LA, there were girls galore! Actually collecting! And selling! hell, some of the world’s best ever bootlegs were manufactured by women in LA!
It was refreshing and fun to talk with them.
my remarks in the post reflected conversation with female collectors in the Seattle area years later (when I was older). According to them, most of the guys selling records teated them condescendingly, if not like outright crap!
They would tell me, “I’d rather pay you $5 for the same record that creep is charging $3 for because you answer my questions and treat me right.”
Ho hum and go figger …
NEAL
I thought I posted something, but I guess it didn’t make it.…?
I found it interesting back when I went to record shows that there were few (as in zero to a handful) women. I wondered why record collecting was such a male dominated field.
Having said that, I see a wider variety (both in age and gender) of folks who are looking at records these days. Makes me happy.
Yup, there are far more women interested in and knowledgeable about records and music than ever before. Thank Goddess …