Now Reading: Dust & Grooves by Eilon Paz

I've been reading this coffee table book entitled Dust & Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting, which was published by Ten Speed Press in 2015.

The author, Eilon Paz, is a photographer with a penchant for music. He put the two of these passions together and came up with D&G, a successful Kickstarter project, for which he traveled around the globe interviewing hardcore vinyl collectors—and photographing their massive vinyl collections. And the book is huge: 12 inches tall, 9.75 inches wide, and about 1.5 inches thick, with 440 pages of some of the most mouth-gaping photos of vinyl collections you will ever see!

Sheila Burgel

"[Record collecting] is a boys club, and if a woman can't play like the men, she's rarely encouraged to join in. Because in the record-collecting world, you have to meet certain criteria...you'd hardly be taken seriously as a collector with a small collection. Quantity matters. So does rarity. And your knowledge about what you collect. What girl wants to bother being held to such silly standards when we're already judged on just about everything else in our lives."
–Sheila Burgel, Brooklyn, NY

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, bandleader for
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

"Records are time capsules. They're emotional, spiritual, energetically bound pieces of vinyl. They were cut with force and energy, not by a programmer."

–William Bensussen, The Gaslamp Killer, Los Angeles

"Questions like favorite album/artist/genre/label/cover are utter bullshit. People less consumed with music can easily give you those answers, but I (and those of my tribe) simply cannot, and that's just the way it is."

–Greg Casseus, Queens, NY

"Collecting records is like voluntarily becoming a historian or a chapter in a long book of musical histories."

–Rich Medina, Philadelphia

"Convenience and shortcuts [the quick click of an mp3] do not enhance pleasure. But take the time to dig out a record, put it on the turntable, sit back and listen...that's where the pleasure is. That's where the relationship with music grows strong; that's where the richness and depth are felt."

–Sheila Burgel once again:
with one of the largest collections of girl groups vinyl in the world