I had read the first part of this story when I was in Virginia last week. Someone sold this person's record collection by mistake at a yard sale, and she had no idea who had bought them.

The buyer ended up doing the right thing:
http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/165712

Very cool story. I can only imagine how I would feel if that happened to my collection.

I know exactly how that collector feels! My original collection from when I was a kid up to my 20's half of it was stolen from our family home overseas. I have been reunited with the other half when my parents went home and shipped everything...I was on vacation in Europe when they told my the other half was missing. I was crushed. I know that some of the records can be replaced, but there is nothing like having the original record you bought and how it had a history behind it. The worst thing about the whole scenario, was it was relatives that stole it who were intrusted to watch over our household there. When my folks asked about it, they denied every last thing...My father and mother were livid and were hesistant to call me in Europe as they feared something bad might happen to me when I got the news. They only broke it to me when I was back here in the U.S. and after they had returned from the Philippines...Sucks right?

I lost most of my record collection twice in my life. Once when my oldest brother took off with my best albums and 45's that I started collecting when I was 5 years old. (I was in 9th grade at the time.) I never got them back and started over from scratch (so to speak). And again in the 80's when I moved to Little Rock, I put my records and gear in temporary storage until I could arrange to collect them later. After a few months of settling in I went to get my stuff out of storage only to find that most of it had been lifted. It sucks. :(

Hey Celt. Most of my collection was from when I was 4 until 20...so I feel your pain...

I lost most of my record collection when I was 20 to an ex-girlfriend.
She "borrowed" about 100 of my albums in order to tape them.
Then, about a week later we broke up. Tried for several weeks to get them back by tracking her down, but they weren't at her apartment, or at her parents house...hhhmmm, perhaps her new boyfriend had a shopping list for her?....
I've gotten most of them back, but a lot of the early Austin punk I had is long gone...and those are the ones that are valueable today..

I also feel you pain. When i came back from Germany on leave from the Army i brought back a fairly righteous collection of albums i purchased while stationed there in the 80's. My leave was over and i was off to my next duty station and had to leave the albums behind at my parents house and the next time i came home i found out they sold them at a rummage sale for a quarter each. I didn't even get the money from the sale. Man was i pissed.

Back when I was in highschool, my girlfriend went with her class on a european tour. I asked her to get me "Dark Side" in quad. She actually found it in the UK, and carried it all across europe. I have yet to see another copy of this record. even the posters were different. I would probably require years of therapy if someone sold my records!

Look at the hours and hours spent flipping through the albums at the thrifts and the time spent driving to garage sales. Try to count how many times you have seen a Firestone Christmas album, something by Ray Coniff, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Andy Williams or Barbara Streisand before you found something that you really wanted to hear. For the tenured albums in your collection, think of the time saving your allowance for albums, or waiting for them to come in the mail from the record club. Then think what you bill your time for, or your employer bills for your time, and try to imagine what is really invested in an album collection.

Even that does not account for how you have connected with the music or the memories associated with playing particular albums (or the damage done to our memory capacity while some albums were playing).

To really bring things down, I was perusing the local CL today, and an auction company is liquidating what was one of the coolest places in town - a used record store with tens of thousands of albums crammed into a midtown KC location. The record store lost it's lease and never reopened at its new location; the owner passed away in the interim. It would be kind of hard to go to that auction, but I'm probably crass enough to do it.

Regards,

D-Ray