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 . . .
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