John Book: Reasons to bring sanitizer on a record buying trip

The other day I was digging at a thrift shop, sticking my hand in crates full of dirty, un-sleeved 45s, hoping to come up with a couple treats for the next mixtape. Mildly successful, I reached back into a crate to grab another stack - and my hand hit something furry. A quick glance revealed some greyish fur, but I couldn't exactly what it was.

That doesn't really matter. I still get a chill thinking about it. After yelling "FUCK!" a couple times - my friend thought something had fallen on me - I asked her to retrieve the hand santizer from my backpack and toss it over to me.

A few days later, I'm perusing veteran musicologist and writer John Book's blog, and I notice he's begun to write recently about these very incidents - "Reasons to Bring Sanitizer on a Record Buying Trip"

Longtime record collectors and crate diggers will tell you that going through vinyl is one of the great things about the hobby. Looking at covers, labels, or merely browsing. Whatever your method is, whether it’s hopping on boxes and making your way through, bending down at a yard sale and thus becoming one of the few examples of a workout for you in a year, it’s one of the joys that leads to hopefully finding good sounds.

Unfortunately, one of the primary drawbacks is allergies. Some records may be covered under years of dust, soot, and who knows what else. Before you look for records, one thing you should bring with you is hand sanitizer. Put it in the car, strap it on your bicycle seat, just have it. I would like to start a list of reasons as to why you need to bring hand sanitizer during a record buying excursion. Let’s begin.

If you are new to records and end up starting a collection with a box you found in the garage, or at your grandparents house, you know that it may be covered with a nice layer of dust. But records can be a nice vacuum for anything and everything. There was a time when cockroaches were able to roam the Earth freely, and somehow they found their way onto records, record covers. People did not have proper record listening rooms, a record player could be in the living room, basement, bedroom, wherever it was convenient. If people had a party, they would bring food and drinks, spill it all over the place. Then the records are placed in a box and forgotten until they’re tossed out in the dumpster or given to Goodwill.

Well, some of your insect friends may have had their way with those records, and you wouldn’t know it. Not that you’re going to tongue your vinyl (and even if the records were clean, that’s just dumb) but there are instances where roaches not only eat through the cover and cause a bit of fluid damage, but they are known to eat through records too. Let’s face it, when there is a nuclear attack on our soil, they say roaches will outlive us all, and they’ll have a belly of your wax.

Anyway, roach infestation isn’t just for your dirty grandfather anymore. Those stains “of unknown origin” are bad, so clean your hands if you need that record that bad. Get some rubbing alcohol and clean those records too (91% isopropyl alcohol is best, and if they card you, it’s because the 91 percent alcohol is used by some to create meth). Buying and collecting records doesn’t have to be a dirty job. Buying cheap has its benefits, and one of them is getting roach grit in your fingernails.

This is just the beginning - I'm sure there'll be more, including "There might be a dead rat in that record crate." In the meantime, keep checking John's blog for the updates, and remember to pack that sanitizer on the next record mission.