The Toronto Reference Library realized it was sitting on a veritable mountain of black gold — metaphorical gold in black-vinyl form, anyway — earlier this year when it got hip to the ongoing resurgence of popular interest in old-school LPs and decided to refresh the 15,000-strong record collection that had lain dormant and gathering dust on its shelves since the advent of CDs during the mid-1980s with an infusion of 100 new titles.

Now, to further stimulate awareness of and interest in a truly impressive hoard of vinyl dating back to the 1950s that takes in everything — just to use the letter “G” as a random point of departure — from George Gershwin to Glenn Gould to Dexter Gordon to Judy Garland to the Good Brothers to the Guess Who to Gilles Vigneault to Les Grands Succès de Georges D’Or to Gordon Lightfoot to Gil Scott-Heron to Godspeed You Black Emperor, the Yonge St. facility is hosting the first-ever “Toronto Reference Library Record Swap” amidst the voluminous stacks at the southwest corner of the fifth-floor arts department from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 16.

Just so you know, though, the TRL’s original copies of such disparate rarities as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Hymnen für elektronische und konkrete Klänge, Willie Thrasher’s Spirit Child, Songs of the Michigan Lumberjacks, the original soundtrack to Revenge of the Nerds and the Creeping Nobodies’ Half-Saboteur EP are no more up-for-grabs at the swap than the new(-ish) releases by the likes of Drake, F---ed Up, Feist, Tanya Tagaq and Kaytranada recently introduced to the shelves by record-collection overseer (and record collector) Beau Levitt. This is merely an invitation to “trade a record or two” with other vinyl fans “or just chat about the latest happenings in the vinyl revival.”

“Unfortunately, no, I won’t be able to swap any of the records from our collection on Monday,” says Levitt. “But I will be bringing a couple from my own to trade.”

The Star took a trip to the Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge St., last week to peruse its vinyl collection. Some of the more interesting discoveries we unearthed with Levitt’s aid are featured in a video on thestar.com .

Our personal favourite? A totally obscure 1982 collection of songs by performers who used to frequent the TTC underground titled Music for Subways: Toronto’s Subway Musicians in the Studio, which includes a track called “Cosmo Girls” by a jazzy folk duo known as the Apples, notable in hindsight for the fact that it counted a young reporter by the name of Peter Howell — then a city desker at the Toronto Sun, now the Toronto Star’s movie critic — as one-half of its membership.





For the record, my friend (and predecessor on the Star’s music beat) Peter has never, ever mentioned this particular chapter of his past to me. I hope he will now forgive me and my co-conspirator/videographer Steve Russell for posting his Hot Tuna-esque contribution to Music for Subways to the internet without any warning. We wouldn’t have done it if it totally sucked. And kudos to Beau Levitt for digging the thing up in the first place. This is what we pay librarians to do, people!