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DO NOT SELL AT ANY PRICE

Amanda Petrusich

The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records

For music lovers, fans of idiosyncratic, award-winning reporting, and readers intrigued by books about subcultures like Stefan Fatsis's Word Freak or Ken Jennings' Maphead comes a fascinating exploration of the rarefied world of the obsessive collectors of 78 rpm records, and of the historic roots of the music being excavated and preserved by this esoteric community.
Before MP3s, CDs, and cassette tapes, before LPs or 45s, the world listened to music on fragile 78 rpm records. While vinyl records have enjoyed a welcome and precipitous renaissance in recent years, 78s remain odd, archaic and extremely hard to come by. Do Not Sell at Any Price explores the insular micro-culture of the 78rpm record, from its heyday to being rendered obsolete, and how collectors and archivists are working frantically to preserve the format before it’s lost forever.

Do Not Sell at Any Price chronicles the author's descent into the oddball fraternity of 78 collectors who operate by their own rules, vocabulary, and economics. Through beguiling interviews and visits to America's most prominent 78 preservers, Petrusich offers both a singular glimpse of the world of 78 collecting and the lost backwoods blues artists whose 78s from the 1920 and 1930s who have yet to be found or heard by modern ears. Do Not Sell at Any Price is an untold story of preservation, loss, obsession, art, and the evolution of the recording formats that have changed the ways we listen to (and create) music.

Petrusich is the author of It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music (Faber and Faber) and Pink Moon, an installment in Continuum’s acclaimed 33 1/3 series. She is a staff writer for Pitchfork and a Contributing Editor at The Oxford American, and her music and culture writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Oxford American, The Onion A.V. Club, The Village Voice, Paste, Wire, Wired, and elsewhere, including the anthologies Hang the DJ: An Alternative Book of Music Lists and The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present. She has an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from Columbia University and presently teaches music writing and pop culture criticism at New York University’s Gallatin School. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Book

Published 2014-07-01 by Scribner

Book

Published 2014-07-01 by Scribner

Comments

I don't know hillbilly from Blind Willie, but I loved Amanda Petrusich's archaeology of an almost-lost world of American music. Do Not Sell at Any Price is like a well-loved 78: it pops, it crackles, it seduces utterly.

Petrusich, a warm and witty writer and longtime music journalist, encounters the eccentric, soulful characters who've devoted their lives to the arcane practice of hunting old records, shares stories of great lost musicians, and ponders the philosophical issues. Readers will be delighted to become her confidantes on this life-changing journey.

Petrusich enters the dusty realms of 78 rpm record junkies, and like Rolling Stones chronicler Stanley Booth, catches her subjects' disease. But she's mostly interested in the emotional heart of things, and the old music's strange power. An entertaining road tale and moving self-interrogation that dives deep for answers, sometimes literally.

This is American history as the tale of an American obsession—the record collectors, be they scholars, scroungers, hoarders, or heroes. In this brilliant book, Petrusich hits the road with these junk-shop blues Ahabs around the country—she makes you feel the frenzy of the chase, on a crazed, loving quest to rescue lost music from oblivion.

One of the best things I've read about that inexplicably, but endlessly, fascinating group of people, the so-called Serious Collectors of 78s. Petrusich burrows into not just their personalities but the hunger that unites and drives their obsessions. She writes elegantly, and makes you think, and most important, manages to hang onto her skepticism in the midst of her own collecting quest.