In her quest to understand the obsessive collectors of pre-war blues 78 rpm records, music critic Amanda Petrusich (It Still Moves) became one herself, finding meaning in the often-fruitless search for these scarce, fragile artifacts of an earlier age. She visits and befriends a few of these quirky collectors; some are cantankerous, others are helpful, still others have only a veneer of social skill. They're all initially wary of her, each testing her knowledge and willingness to acknowledge their superior understanding of the hobby.
One friendly collector introduces her to several of his compatriots: all male and single-mindedly meticulous. In one chapter, she analyzes the potential of collectors to have some sort of OCD or autistic tendencies--each man, she asserts, collects these rarities to protect against the loss of self, or perhaps as a way to impose order on an unordered universe. Some collectors are in it for the music. Others are in it for the recognition. Some of these men haven't listened to a modern recording since the 1970s.
A fan of the music, Petrusich soon became a fan of the dedicated hobbyists, too, though she felt out of place in this male-dominated mini society. Eventually, she found herself in scuba gear, searching the gritty waters of the Mississippi River to find discarded albums, once thrown like Frisbees by record studio employees.
Why and how these men collect their records is as interesting as the story of the music on the discs; Petrusich ably humanizes these characters while charting the course of a section of music history. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor