This topic always reminds me of the great scene in the movie Diner, with the husband berating the wife for misfiling a record she listened to while he was out.
How do you arrange the order of your records?
I guess some alphabetically. Some by genre. By quality. Etc.
My preference is keeping them randomly arranged. This way I get a nice variety and I don’t have to choose. And it’s always a nice surprise.
I take them out about ten at a time and place them in a dedicated space between my mono blocks.
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Back in the day I bought a lot of LPs from Roger Hewland who had a shop near Waterloo Station in London. All his stock was shelved totally at random and he had a lot of shelves. His only concession to order was to put new arrivals in a separate area, still at random. One day I asked him why he didn't put the albums in some kind of order. He said 'well you've been here three hours looking at every record I have. If I put them in order you would just look for specific items.' His customers typically spent a whole afternoon in the shop. He provided coffee and had easy chairs where we could get a rest and have a chat about music, mainly opera. He was a good bit older than I and the shop isn't there any more. He said to me one time 'one day I'll get your record collection'. I never could follow that. Another day a Japanese man, a regular customer, had been searching for three or four hours. He had pulled out about 20 discs and took them over to Roger to pay him. Roger said 'I'm not going to sell you any records today'. Asked why, he said that he had seen the man push Roger's cleaner away when she was trying to vaccuum around his feet. They don't make 'em like that any more. Roger's brother was the eponymous designer and maker of the gearboxes that monopolised the rear of grand prix and other cars from the 50s to the 70s. |
@clearthinker Sweet story. Enjoyed that. Discogs is great but I do miss the record shops of 40 years ago. We spent hours in them. It's probably why I have my records stored in record store format instead of library book format. |
My partner and I used to have over 1,000 DVDs and BluRays. She was in charge of filing them… she had them broken down into a dozen categories then alphabetical across six big wall storage units. I could never find a thing. She would say, “It is in Action.? Where is that? She would reply under Fantasy. I would say, where is that? The whole over classified mess was incomprehensible to me. |
Jazz albums are “albums” so they go with everything else, alphabetically. Thats everything except: Classical music are not “albums,” so they are separate, arranged chronologically by composer (Pachelbel, Vivaldi, Bach at beginning, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, La Monte Young at the end) There is a small 3rd grouping of soundtracks, Christmas music, and comedy LPs. Because I have such a healthy amount of Mancini, I put all of his soundtrack LPs with the main stack. |
The records between my mono blocks are only there long enough for a rotation of the 10 or so. About 3 days. And my mono blocks are AGD Audions Class D. They run very cool. Guess I will always prefer random like the shuffle setting on a CD player. Not tracks of a disc but whole albums. I like being surprised and love the variety. Not to mention the Herculean task of sorting out hundreds of LPs. |