Selling your classical LP's

You may wonder why 25 per cent of the selling price ­ which might seem a very low figure to the uninitiated ­ is actually a fair buying price. Businesses which deal in used merchandise seldom pay more than this much, and often less. This kind of business is very labour-intensive; you might even consider it a hybrid of retail sales and service, as the dealer cannot simply sit in his office and order whatever merchandise he needs from a distributor.

I remember an article by an experienced used book dealer on how to start your own used book store. His advice was to start off paying no more than 20 per cent of your expected selling price for books. As you gained more experience, you could increase the amount to 25 per cent, as long as you were buying mostly books you had a reasonable chance of selling. Another used book dealer I know, who has more than half a century of experience, tells me he spends about 20 per cent of his yearly income on buying books, 70 per cent on labour and other expenses, and winds up with 10 per cent profit per year.

When Canfield buys collections, he goes through the records and computes the value to him of the valuable records in the collection, figuring at 20 to 25 per cent of his selling price. Then he evaluates the remainder at 25 to 50 cents each, depending on the collection. Although these figures may seem low, he has his choice of record collections to buy and usually has 30 to 40 collections waiting for him at any given time. People who run record shops tell me similar stories. As one example, the owner of one very large store, who had well over 200,000 records in stock, told me he never paid more than ten to 15 cents a record for collections. He did not have to, he said, because he was offered so much good material at that price and many other people were willing to give LPs to him just to get rid of them. A buyer at a large used record shop in the American Southwest told me recently that he had turned down a large collection of Russian Melodiya LPs offered to him at 50 cents a record because he simply did not have any market for them. (I asked him to find out if he could get them for me ...) In other words, it's a buyer's market.

When people call me with record collections for sale, I ask them several questions immediately. "How many records do you have?" or "how many feet of shelf space do they take up?" Unless the records are very close by, or I have reason to think that many of them are valuable, I usually won't travel to look at fewer than a thousand records. "When were the records purchased?" Most of the records I want to buy were made before 1970, with the exception of esoterica and unusual imports. "Do you know where the records were purchased?" Most large collections are in good condition, because even if they are careless people don't have the time to damage very many records. But I once turned down a collection of 20,000 records offered to me for $2,000 because they had all been purchased by someone who had not examined them carefully. I could have got more than $2,000 worth of records out of the collection but it was not worth the time and expense of transporting and sorting them.

If you have records you want to sell, what should you do with them? I would say that the first thing is to investigate whether or not they are worth selling: look over your records and get some idea of what you have. How many records are there? What kind of condition are they in? What is the proportion of mono to stereo records? (Mono LPs which were issued only in that form can be valuable, but mono copies of stereo records are usually worth very little; admittedly it takes some experience to recognize these.) Do you know when they were purchased? It also helps to be able to summarize the type of music in the collection, if it lends itself to a summary. These days, for example, a collection of chamber music LPs from the early 1950s can be highly collectable, while a collection of major label complete opera sets from the 1970s is likely to be almost worthless.

Once you have such an idea, find a record dealer in your general area and give him or her a call. (I am not just being politically correct; there are now several women running excellent record businesses.) Introduce yourself, mention that you have a record collection for sale and offer the information I have suggested above. If you meet with a cordial reception, you may then want to arrange for a visit.