As a music fan and lifelong record collector, I love the opportunity to join Amoeba buyers when they travel to check out large privately-owned record collections to potentially scoop up and get onto the shelves at Amoeba Music's three stores. For me, flipping through record collections is always fun. I get a kick out of looking at album covers, spotting records that I already know and/or own, along with ones I have never seen nor heard of. Such was the case earlier this week when I joined Amoeba Marc just outside of New York City to check out a moderate sized record collection consisting of mostly LPs from the '70's through the early '90's and ranging in genres. Our job was to check out the collection to see if it had records Amoeba customers would want (it did) and then to pack it up and ship it back safely (there's an art to shipping large quantities of records without them encountering any damage) to Amoeba's Hollywood store where they will begin making their way into the vinyl isles within a week.



The first record collection buy for Amoeba that I was a part of was a few years back in Queens, NY when we packed and shipped a 30,000 unit (mostly vinyl) collection cross country back to Cali. That was a large collection but not compared to one that Amoeba Marc and crew shipped from Ohio earlier this year. That one numbered 80,000 records, which is a lot to pack and ship. In comparison, this latest collection acquired by Amoeba was relatively modest in scale. It numbered 3,200 12" records (90% albums with the balance in 12" singles) and around 750 7" singles, plus a short stack of 10" singles/EPs. That' a little over three quarters of a ton in weight; something I learned from Peanut Butter Wolf who released the 2001 album My Vinyl Weighs A Ton. That album's title, he informed me in a previous Amoeblog on this topic, was based on not just a play on words of the famous Public Enemy album but also his personal experience when he had to move and determine the weight of his vinyl for the trucking company. 4,000 LPs = 1 ton. The U-Haul "small" size box (the best size box for record packing/shipping) holds approx 100 albums and weighs approx 60 lbs.



Among those LPs, 12" singles, and 45's from this week's Amoeba acquisition - from an anonymous former music biz insider's home collection - were wonderful finds that ranged from some rare or long out of print and hard to find (including some test pressings of sought after releases), to more common records with wide appeal to collectors both serious and casual. These covered a wide array of genres from reggae and hip-hop to disco, electro, classic rock, experimental, punk rock, jazz, blues, zydeco, folk, Brazilian, African, comedy, spoken word, soundtracks, and compilations in varying genres.

As with the previous Amoeba music collection acquisitions that I was involved with, the real challenge while packing up these boxes of records is to stay focused on the packing of the vinyl process and not get sidetracked by ogling each record cover's back and front. Of course, I had to make a few exceptions and snapped some pictures of those records (featuring, due to my bias, lots of hip-hop, including the very first Tommy Boy Records release - Afrika Bambaata & The Jazzy 5's "Jazzy Sensation" from before the pioneering hip-hop record label had even designed their well known company logo). Look for this vinyl shipment, arriving at Amoeba Hollywood in the week ahead.







