I’ve seen this girls posts a few times and something came up for me once. At the start I’m sure she said something like “I just spent a couple of weeks alphabetising my dad’s record collection” and I remember that stressed me out at the time. Alphabetisation is like something that a non-collector does when confronted with a collection. I’m a dad who collects vinyl and know that my shelves have formed themselves into sense, slowly over time, and that there is a deep ordering – formed by shifting one record at a time after playing it – based on my taste and likes and preferences. So I can’t critique but it did make me a little sad at the time that the first thing she did was to wipe out the order her dad had left it in, which probably looked like chaos to her. What’s done is done though, I just know that once she gets to the end she might realise that there was a sense and logic to how it had been left.
When my Dad died, I was the one who "disassembled" his workshop. There was an order to it, which I grew up with, and that order deeply captured the way my father thought. It felt right to be pulling this personal thing apart. More like an act of saying goodbye rather than something destructive. I was probably the only one that knew the ordering, so I was remembering times in that workshop as I went, rather than just "cleaning up the mess". It also seemed right that the tools pass onto the next generation rather the order be preserved as a shrine.
I’m sorry for your loss. I’ve been building a fence this weekend, and thinking about my late Dad who taught me everything I know about building and fixing things.
I agree that your dad would have felt very satisfied that it was you who took care of those belongings.
Thanks. Mainly I was posting to pass on the insight that I had at the time: that dealing with a death can be a process of transition rather than preservation.
One thing about used shops whether they are book stores or art antique ones is there’s two kinds. One simply tries to make money. But the second is a representation of a persons mind. Usually these shops the space is owned but not rented. But you can clearly see inside of the mind without understanding the mind of these people. Like, why does this book shop have a whole section of typewriter written new age religious manifestos with accompanying cassette tapes? Why does this antique shop have mannequins with fish heads everywhere?
Yeah thanks for your comment. My thoughts about her weren’t a criticism - you’re totally right the records are now hers to start from scratch with. It was just a little niggle that came up for me that she missed something about the collection without even realising perhaps. But you could be correct to and she wanted a clean slate of it and to treat the music as hers and to discover it her way. It seems like she had a cool dad regardless, and he gave her a great gift even in his passing.
As a person who descends from a line of hoarders, you really should examine why your empathy went to the dead collector and his system instead of the girl who lost her father.
When my paternal granddad died, he left 39 000 books behind. I hope you can imagine the physical and emotional effort of unloading 40k books.
Maybe the daughter should appreciate all that lovely ordering nuance, or maybe not. For my money, large collections are expressions of a pathology and there is no duty to keep them pristine once their owners pass. In fact I think it’s quite rude to leave that burden to others. Your shit, your problem.
I know a guy who's grandfather died and left him the contents of his basement. After his grandfather passed, he drove several hours to the home and found a floor to ceiling collection of comic books going all the way back into the golden age of comics - thousands upon thousands of books.
He rented a moving truck, and put them all in some storage units closer to where he lived. It turns out he had also recently lost his job, and so with nothing else to do, and the impending need for some money, he started cataloging and selling them on eBay, bootstrapped his way into opening a small comic book business, then opened a larger store selling other things, which turned into a small chain of stores selling all kinds of hobby and collector stuff in the local area.
When I decided to offload my small childhood collection, he made me a generous offer for it which enabled me to make rent month. As he was looking through what I brought he told me this story, I asked what happened to the original collection. He said he now had a warehouse full of inventory of people's collections like mine, and that he just continued to move them via his stores, shows, and eBay. It had made him a steady living.
What you do with these things very much depends on you and an ability to find positivity in the situation. A literal library's worth of books is not an easy thing to handle for certain. I grew up in a family printing business so I have a pretty reasonable idea of how difficult it is to handle and store 40-50-60k books so I'm not without sympathy. But there is often value in these kinds of things.
I get you. There was actually a lot more monetary value than even you might presume. Many of the books were worth 30K+ at auction. But many others weren’t and they were all still a pain to cope with, plus all the other smaller collections we had to deal with. In any case, the broader point is that valuing a collection over people is always a bad idea.
As somebody who also inherited their great grandfather's prized polka sheet music collection and some accordions, and has approximately zero interest in either...and has also found that the secondary market near where they live doesn't exist, I feel you.
It all depends on the family, how close they are/were, their shared interests etc. Not sure we can pass generalized comments - what if my dad left me 40K books and he and I shared interest in books? It may not be rude for my dad then to leave me his collection.
On the other hand, if I am someone who hates to read, then yeah, even 40 books might be annoying much less 40K
Maybe I let my ranting get in the way of my main point: Objects and their order matter less than people and their problems. If you find yourself ranking things the opposite way, you should think that through.
No aggression meant towards the original commenter but in my experience as a son and grandson, that road can take you somewhere you don’t want to end up as a father.
Edit:I should add I’m just as pathological as the rest of my family. Instead of stuff I collect rules, and I have to be very careful to not impose those rules unconsciously on other people.
This may be the most vinylphillic response to someone's expression of grief ever written. "I get that she lost her dad, but what she should really feel bad about is re-ordering his record collection!"
Haha honestly my point was a very minor one. Just my heart sank a little when her first video was a passing remark about alphabetising the collection, it made me think that there was probably an order in there already that she hadn’t even grokked. But they’re her records, and the music is the main thing that matters.
The only person who may have been able to make sense of the original order has passed on from this mortal coil and isn’t coming back either to assist in finding records, nor to be heartbroken or salty that she’d “ruined [his] filing system!”
And I do not think this is one of those things where if only she had spent six months studying it and doing a big wall full of pushpins, index cards, and post-its joined by yarn lines, suddenly it would all make sense and she’d inherit a magical musical truth.
> Most of the vinyls were packed in boxes or held by relatives and friends before Jula slowly brought them all home
Seems like once she put the collection back together, the order was already lost.
Appart from that, I feel like there is some poetry to her slowly making it her own collection by listening to the records one by one. Kind of like a new like growing from within the records.
Alphabetisation is like something that a non-collector does when confronted with a collection.
Each to their own, it's certainly something I've done in the past as a (former) collector - the stress you felt may be more of a projection reaction, though your observations about meaning in the madness are valid.
There's certainly some truth that the ordering of the records is important but in her defense it is mentioned she didn't inherit the collection intact but rather assembled it together as it had been distributed to friends and relatives of her father.
The novel High Fidelity has an opening scene with the protagonist deciding exactly how he's going to re-order his collection in a particular personal way.
i guess it depends! i've been collecting for at least 15yrs and i still keep it organized alphabetically and then chronologically. i always loved the idea of a 'high fidelity' type organization system though.
Yeah but that was kind of my point - my collection isn’t alphabetised and I can still find things, even though there’s no actual system like alphabetisation in place.
