Books and Vinyl

We are downsizing. We are preparing to move to a smaller house next year after 37 years in our current home. This means getting rid of stuff we no longer need, or want, because we won’t have the room in the new place. Two early, and obvious, victims of the purge are the dozens of books we have accumulated over the years, and of course, the old vinyl record albums. Some records I still had from college. And, we can’t forget the box of 45s my wife still had in the attic. For twenty and thirty somethings, 45s are a little smaller than a personal pizza. They have a hole in the middle about the size of a half dollar. The hit song was on one side, and the less than hit song, was on the B side. They sold for about sixty-nine cents.

My wife and I have always been big readers, and we grew up in the sixties listening to and collecting records that are now played on the oldies stations. Just about all the books I have collected are non-fiction. Mostly history and biographies. I think it came from life in the news business, and wanting to know who made history and why. My wife always read fiction. I think my business gave her all the non-fiction she could handle.

Writing a book or writing and recording an album are one of the great individual achievements in life. It can take years of work, and sometimes years of rejection, before someone says this is good enough to publish or record for sale. Finally, you could hold the finished product in your hands. The reader or listener had a product they could touch. Turn the pages. Look at the pictures. Listen to the music over and over. Look at the album cover art. Read the liner notes.

I always had a sense of accomplishment when I finished a book. I could put it on the shelf with all the others I read, thinking … look at all the places I’ve been and lives I have learned about. The albums could be played over and over and enjoyed for years, and could be neatly filed on another shelf.

We moved on to the CD era, and have a collection of those. And we now are full participants in the digial revolution. We are downloading music to our phones and Sonos. We also, of course, have Kindles. My wife even has the one with the light on it so she can keep reading when I put the light out at night to go to sleep. The convienence is great. We can download songs and books in seconds. It is great to finish a book while sitting in bed, and download the next one you want to read without even adjusting the pillow.

But now we don’t even know what book the other is reading. If I want to feel that sense of accomplishment I have when I finish a book, I have to go to the Home page of my Kindle and scroll through the titles. It’s not quite the same. All this brings me back to downsizing.

I loaded all the albums into a box, and brought them to a store that specializes in buying and selling vinyl. Of course, vinyl is now cool again. The store was like a step back in time. Album covers on the wall. Those big bins where albums are filed by type of music. I saw the Led Zeppelin album I remember hearing for the first time in a college dorm room. “Stairway To Heaven” has a way of sticking in your mind.

The store owner went through the carton of albums and 45s. He picked out about three of four. The Beatles and Billy Joel. And offered me five dollars. He said he would only take the 45s if they were in the original sleeves. They were not. I made $4.50. I had put fifty cents in the meter.

I then took a carton of books to the library. The woman there was very nice. She said they only accepted donations on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. That’s when the volunteers were there to sort them. They only accepted three grocery bags full at a time. She gave me three. I’ll be making several trips.

Books and music are among our most precious possessions. They give us knowledge, comfort, pleasure, and excite our senses. They can take us to a time and place that are not reachable in any other way. We bond with the characters we read about. Just remember the recent reaction to Harper Lee’s book “Go Set A Watchman”. The hero, Atticus Finch, turned out to have failings and faults just like the rest of us.

Books and music hold up a mirror to society and our times. I did feel a little guilty packing up the books and albums. It’s saying goodbye to old friends. Even though I still have my Kindle and ITunes. What we read and listen to helps make us who we are, whether we get it magically on our phones or tablets, or turn the pages of a book or drop a needle on vinyl.