Collecting Everybody who owns a phonograph collects phonograph records. If you are a person of catholic tastes, your collection probably includes opera and other classics, show tunes, popular songs, jazz, dance music, and folk songs, including the great Western recordings of Gene Autry and the Sons of the Pioneers, whose membership once included Roy Rogers.

Of course, we who have such recordings do not consider ourselves collectors. We buy records for what they contain and we prefer new records, for recording techniques have been marvelously improved in the last generation—especially in the last few years. If we have some old 78's, we replace them, when we have a few dollars to spare, with the newer and infinitely better 33Ws and 45's.

But, unless our 78's have been lost or destroyed, they still have long lives ahead of them with the real record collectors—those who collect old records. Of course, our discards of rather recently recorded 78's have little interest for the collector, except, perhaps, as items that may become valuable in the future. What he wants are the real old-timers, records that were made during the 1920's and earlier.

The records most sought after, and therefore the most valuable, are the recordings of the Enrico Carusos, the Al Jolsons, and other great stars of the past. As a rule, the only way to acquire such records is to buy them from a dealer at the current market price. Prices, of course, vary. The determining factors in a record's cost are scarcity, condition of the record, and the importance of the recording artist.




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March 11, 2010