If one book explains what record collecting means without writing a single line of theory, this is it. Photographer Eilon Paz spent six years travelling the world — forty cities, twelve countries — entering the record rooms of more than a hundred and thirty collectors and photographing them among their shelves. The result is a four-hundred-page coffee-table volume that is at once an anthropological document and a beautiful object, with a foreword by RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan and interviews with the likes of Questlove and Gilles Peterson.
What makes Dust & Grooves special is not the famous names but the way Paz looks at ordinary obsessives: the collector fixated on Turkish psychedelia, the one chasing Sesame Street records, the one devoted to 1960s French girl groups. Each portrait records a devotion, and together they form a collective portrait of a passion that crosses class, country and genre. It is a book every collector recognises as their own — because in one of those rooms, somewhere, is us.
For the newcomer it is the ideal emotional entry point: it doesn't explain how to collect, it makes you want to. For the seasoned collector it is a mirror. Either way, it is the finest book to keep open on the table beside the turntable.
