23,000...

7-14-09 23,000

After returning from my 4^th of July trip to Santa Cruz / San Jose, I noticed that as I entered new titles in my collection, the number of titles landed exactly at 23,000. I remember that when I stopped keeping an Excel spread sheet of music video, it was at (or very near) 23,000. I wonder: Is 23,000 a magic number where I…lose interest?

Anybody who has ever kept a big list knows of the trouble of keeping a list of this nature – and the proofreading necessary to get everything to ‘sort’ properly etc. Anybody with this much stuff knows it isn’t easy to ‘maintain’ a collection of anything with this many units present.

I have previously teased that I wanted to get either one of those British machines that holds 8,750 CD’s or the slightly older Sony hard-drive audio system. I was reminded that disks always fail. Can’t have that!

So, at 23,000 – I fell like I should get rid of some stuff, to try and get the number back down. I will sell at the next Claremont LP swap meet, in September – certainly. I may even get back to some eBay sales (it might even help pay for an upcoming trip!). I can always take cartons of stuff into an Amoeba store, for sale or trade.

Certainly won’t touch any of my acknowledged ‘big’ collections: Frank Zappa, Scritti Politti, The Stranglers, Barry Humphries, Split Enz, The Firesign Theatre etc. In 2009, I have been concentrating on 7” singles, actually. Seems like they don’t take up all that much space – but I don’t have so many, only a handful more than 4,000 7” singles in 2009. For the last 15 years, my 45 collection had hovered around 3,000.

I admit, I have purchased many CD’s over the last few years. And I still look at the $1 LP’s at the swap meet. One man’s floor is another man’s ceiling! I return again to my idea of “The Perfect Collection” – which would definitely be a radically smaller number than 23,000 titles – I think I once came up with a list of about 9,000 titles that I would be completely happy with…and that was keeping a lot of stuff.

So, either on my way to 24,000 or maybe after a few months, I will be able to report that my collection has shrunk a bit. We’ll see. I have several sets of scans of many 45 covers and CD booklets up on Flickr (I am user “rk-dd”). That helps; If I ever ‘lost’ everything – I’d still have some of the images…

But we all know that sometimes, an artist will suddenly rise in importance, and I’ll run to my wall of music, in search of enlightenment (the variety of which falls into the category of “already owned”). About 10+ years ago, I realized that I squeezed the sponge too hard, and I no longer owned a vinyl copy of Procol Harum “Home”. It drove me nuts. Now I have several versions, all brimming with exactly the kind of information I required (especially the insert in the UK original!). Destined to own vinyl. Destined to love music. Music is good, even when everything else is bad…or indifferent…

Pictured: Procol Harum - from the insert to "Home"