Before vinyl there were 78s: thick, brittle, ten-inch shellac discs that broke if you looked at them wrong. And before vinyl collectors there were 78 collectors — a brotherhood of obsessive, eccentric, almost monastic men who spent their lives chasing the only surviving copies of certain 1920s blues and country recordings. Amanda Petrusich went into that world and wrote one of the finest books ever made about collecting.
The book's strength is that Petrusich is not a collector. She is a music journalist — she writes for The New Yorker — who approaches the subculture as an outsider, with curiosity and a degree of wariness, and is gradually infected by it. That outside eye is exactly what makes the book universal: it isn't written for initiates, it's written for anyone who has ever wondered what drives a person to give their life to objects.
And what objects. The 78s the book describes are among the rarest things on earth: some copies are unique, the sole survivor of a recording that would otherwise no longer exist. Petrusich reports auctions where these discs reach tens of thousands of dollars, collectors who dive into Southern rivers in search of records dumped decades ago, the lineage that ties these hunters to figures like Harry Smith and the cartoonist R. Crumb. It reads like invention and is real to the bone.
But beneath the adventure runs a deeper reflection, and that is what sets the book apart. Petrusich uses 78 collecting to ask what it means to own music, to preserve it, to save it from oblivion. These obsessives are, in effect, the accidental archivists of a heritage the institutions had forgotten: without them, entire musical traditions would have vanished. Their mania has a cultural function beyond the mania.
For the Groov-illa reader, it's a book that speaks to all of us, whatever format we collect. Because the question it asks — why we hunt these objects, what we're really looking for when we look for a record — is the same one faced by anyone who has spent an afternoon digging through a crate of dusty vinyl. Petrusich offers no easy answer. But she makes clear that the question is serious, and that the answer has to do with memory, loss, and the desire not to let beautiful things die.
