What to do, what to do...

What do you do if you have a collection of something so rare that even collectors don't know it exists?

About 15 years ago, I was with my (then) wife in, of all places, Roswell, NM. If you have the chance, don't -- it is so not worth the trip. Two main "museums", devoted almost entirely to interviews with people who think they saw something back in 1947 -- not a shred of evidence.

After that disappointing trip, we ducked into a nearby antique/collectibles/general junk shop to see what they had. Looking around the various tables, we were both thinking that Roswell needs to be scratched off our list of places to ever go again.

Then my foot hit something under one of the tables. I peeked under the table cloth, and there were about 4 milk crates filled with record albums, all with plain white sleeves and no jackets. I pulled one box out, slipped up a disc and checked it out.

It said, in gold letters, "Dick Clark -- Show #34".

Quickly flipping through the other boxes, all the disks said the same thing, only with varying show numbers, going all the way to about #285. As I have no poker face at all, I summoned the wife to broker a deal for the crates, and we arrived at $25. We loaded them into the car and drove off like we had just knocked over the First National Bank!

Over the next few hours, I checked out my new acquisition: over 300 hours of two radio shows by Dick Clark, one called "Solid Gold" (no relation to the 1980's TV show), and one called "Dick Clark's Music Machine". Finally getting a turntable again, I listened to a few dozen of the shows: Solid Gold was no mere title, it was a true description of what is on these discs. Interviews with Rock Royalty, like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley. Current early 1970's music by Eric Clapton, Pink Floyd and Barry Manilow. A whole history of Rock, and I had hundreds of hours of it!

According to some of the play sheets, which were still included from the radio station these were originally lent to, these shows pre-date "Rock Roll & Remember" by a good 10-15 years. If you try to Google "Dick Clark Solid Gold" or "Dick Clark's Music Machine", you come up with paltry few sites that even mention them. On Dick Clark's own websites, these shows aren't even listed in his body of work! How am I going to sell these things if Dick Clark himself doesn't make mention of them?

A few years ago, I did sell one of the shows on eBay, that contained an interview with Chuck Berry, and got $80 for it! The collection has already paid for itself.

So, I've got about 290 hours of these shows on vinyl. If I knew of a serious collector of radio shows on vinyl, I could probably get a pretty penny for them. If I try to sell the shows one at a time, it could take months, or never.

As of now, they have sat on my shelves for 15 1/2 years, taking up space, worth essentially nothing. Part of me wants to just toss them into a dumpster. What to do, what to do?  --JB

Chaplin, Anyone?

First off, many thanks to Grace, for the nice words...

Kind of got caught up in the Thanksgiving holiday, haven't had much of a chance to make a dent in the sum of my material possessions.

Tonight, however, I finally got the last of the books that I was willing to part with, and head on over to Half Price Books (thank goodness for them!). I dropped off 36 books, including 19 on Charlie Chaplin! Some of them must have been pretty rare, because they gave me $29 this time! {That comes to 80 cents a book! Not too shabby...}

That still leaves me with 102 books, including 27 autographed books. I hope in the next week or so to rid myself of all but the autographed books.

My major project for 2011 will be to reduce my computer data to what can be held in a couple of external hard drives. I currently have something like 500 CD's and DVD's that are just pictures, old programs, countless backups from the 6 computers I've owned over the last 20 years. Although bulky, I should be able to get them all into a single Terabyte Hard Drive. Just going to take a couple of dedicated weekends.

--JB

And so it begins...

So, have to start somewhere.

My name's John. I'm 46 (will soon be 47), and I'm going through a divorce. A couple of months ago, I moved into a small 1 bedroom apartment from the 3br shared home I've lived in for the past 6 years of a 17-year marriage.

Never move out of your house in Texas in August.

I didn't think I had that much stuff, but my move took 12 hours, and required 4 pickup truckfuls to haul all my stuff. Most of it is just bulk: record albums. Books. Video Tapes. Boxes and boxes of them, accumulated over the last 30 some years of being a grownup.

Even though I spent tons o'money on my collections, none of it is worth anything. These days you can't give away vinyl LP's. Books, forget about it, they take up room, and is usually only of value to whomever bough them in the first place. Plus, the Kindle is taking over big-time.

So. My lease here run out next August. My plan is to try to get rid of all the worthless stuff I have (with a few notable exceptions), and the next time I move I want to be able to pack a few small boxes of stuff, throw it in my car, and go.

Within the last couple of months, I've gone from a collection of about 950 books down to around 80. All of the extra books were sold to Half Price Books here in College Station TX, for anywhere from $0.12 a book to $0.22 a book, depending on what it actually was. (That's about $100, for a collection of books I probably paid a total of close to $9000 for over a 30-year period).

There are other collections, and other ways to ditch my material possessions, so stay tuned!  --JB