There are different ways a record collection can start. Some lucky kids inherit a ton of great albums or singles from a friend, relative or neighbour, and good luck to them, I say.

For me it started with one album on my fifteenth birthday — Led Zeppelin II — and on that rock I built my collection. My wages from working Saturdays in a commercial kitchen were almost entirely consumed by records. After Led Zeppelin came Atomic Rooster’s Death Walks Behind You. Now I was a “record collector.”

Records were relatively expensive for a teenager like me on small wages, so I extracted full value from every one I bought. This meant listening to it until I knew every phrase, note and breath in the music and the duration of silence between tracks. My brain was imprinted with every word and image on those glorious gatefold covers; the music and production credits, the lyric sheet, the inner sleeve and the label.

People sometimes say record collecting is “all about the music,” but it’s about much more than that. Records are a complete sensory and intellectual experience, from the way all albums “flow” from track to track, to the feel of the cover, the weight of the vinyl, the glorious sheen across a pristine playing surface, the design and artistry of the packaging and the progression of an artist’s message from one record to the next.

Then there’s the “collective effect” of a lot of records viewed from a distance – a dense forest of multicoloured spines in which to browse, pick and savour the delights of one’s own choosing.

Of course there’s also a “social effect” of collecting. I am irresistibly drawn to other collector’s treasure also – not in a covetous way; I like to see how our tastes and collections differ and how they match. I find myself excitedly blurting: “I’ve got this!” or “Oh wow! I have been looking for this one forever!” Or that most adulatory of phrases, “would you put this one on?” Record collectors understand each other’s passion completely, even if they have wildly different taste in music, or come from different generations. People connect through vinyl in a way nobody will ever connect through mp3.

As I grew older, I toyed with collecting CDs, but these are mere pale shadows of records. God willing, I will never stop collecting and enjoying albums until the day I die. Then I’d like nothing better than for another collector to acquire and cherish my records just as I have cherished them over four decades; to discover, as I have, that nothing yet created by man has greater beauty than a well crafted record.

As we say on planet vinyl, “may your collection prosper.”