you think you have a lot of crap...

Sheet Music - 25,000+ organized in 150 boxes from early 1900’s and forward.

It looks like it might be able to be packed down into two huge 53 foot tractor trailers.

We hear the US Army is good at moving stuff on this scale.

I snagged CBS half-speeds from Al DiMeola, Kansas and Jeff Beck.

At least worth a few cents a piece.

I guess they didn't have an insurance policy so there would be no point in trying to secure an expert in making arson look like accidental fire. Heck, couldn't you bid for an arsonist on eBay?

Reminds me of a story in the LA Times a few years back about record and pop junk collectors. If I recall, Demento's girlfriend or wife was mournfully wondering what in the world she would do with his stuff if he died before she did.

A friend of mine who ran the vmyths.com website tried to auction it on eBay for a quarter of a million dollars and got zero takers. It had been a business, one I'd done work for, and then the Internet bubble burst and crashed it and he got called up by the Air Force and sent to Iraq. When he came back it had become worthless so he and his business partner tried to sell it off.

How do these even get publicity? Do you have them jammed at you in spam mail as an account holder on eBay or do they go on the main page in big bold lights? Looka-here, a mountain of dry goods for $25,000. Open your own unsuccessful store and try, just try, to enter 500,000 items on eBay. At five minutes an entry, working swiftly and without break, sleep or mealtime, it will only take you five years to complete the job.

Getting passed around message boards doesn't harm it's chances either.

i bet all the records suck.
maybe there is a clash record in there or something.
-- Special Agent Dale Koopa (dr.carl.saga...), October 24th, 2005 3:49 PM.

totally OFF TM! I'm trying to remember what I bought there .. it's been about 7 or 8 years since I went. I spent a fun afternoon going through the stacks. I'm almost positive I bought a couple West, Bruce and Laing lps there .. I think maybe a Help Yourself record too. Oh wait .. I *know* I found Buck Dharma's Flat Out there. Yeah, it's starting to come back to me. a White Witch lp maybe? I remember that they had multiple Silver Apples originals but they were overpriced ... like $20 or something.

but yeah, like I say, this *was* 7 or 8 years ago so who knows, maybe the collection is all crap at this point. 7 or 8 years is a lot of time for wannabe DJ Shadow chancers to have picked the place over. It's sad about the woman dying.

Yeah, I'm sure they do. It's probably as super as a temp agency's.
25 percent of your yearly gross or $10,000 per family, whichever is more, for atrocious copayments, deductibles and use only of "recommded" medical providers. I bet enrollment is superb. Like I said, don't get sick. It's too late to file for rescue under the bankruptcy law if you find yourself $30,000 in debt with no hope to repay after a sudden hospitalization.

I reckon only good things can come of the future economy. It's only logical they bring back debtor's prison. What else to do with all those deadbeats who can't make up the difference mandated by their virtual health plans from the on-line marketplace of ideas and services.

It's the "gleaner" society. All the third world nations have "gleaners" who spend their lives picking over landfills and garbage heaps for pieces of scrap and metal they can sell for a couple pennies in the center of town. Every Tuesday there's a homeless "gleaner" who picks through the recycling bins put in the street in my neighborhood in Pasadena. eBay furnishes a different type of heap for "gleanerization." Woo-wee! Onward, upward downward and forward!

My grandfather had this garage and houseful of "antiques." And he believed almost to the end of his life there was something in it that would bring him a fortune or semi-fortune. And there were some things that netted $25. One went for $60 once. Just think of what must be locked up in the apartments of Voice employees in NYC. Some people must have goods worth $500 at least.

I think it's a shibboleth of American belief, that somewhere in your life experience you might accumulate some detritus of society that's worth something, that will facilitate a hitting of the jackpot. And for an occasional random person, that will be true and you might see it in a magazine or on TV.

But more likely, the average person's experience is going to be what I call a casualty of the "Rinker effect." Rinker, as in Harry Rinker, a guy who lived in Pennsy who had a nationally syndicated column on collectibles and antiques. And it ran in lots of places, was taken very seriously in the newspaper I worked for. And the guy was just a pox. He had a warehouse full of "stuff" which he assigned value to by writing about it.

At one point, he wrote about the "collectibility" of ceramic insulators that were used on old electrical power lines that had become obsolete. It could have been Jobriath original vinyl. These things were worthless. They became worth a lot in auction after he wrote about them. Why? Just because he said so.

And, of course, who had a box of them in the warehouse?

The parallels to what's worth anything on eBay or any auction site, like "used" records on Amazon, are the same. You like playing the lottery, I say go for it. It could happen. Who knows who will have the next Velvet Underground acetate?

Not much of a model for economic prosperity though.

The optimistic side of me sees these types of collections as modern day cabinets of curiosities that distill beauty and order out of the most disposable, mundane remnants of our society. Unfortunately the impulse to appreciate and catalog too often seems to be overshadowed by the dream of chasing a big payoff.