An Admirably Obsessive Record of Records
A handwritten listing of a DJ’s 45-rpm records is filled with peculiarities that amount to a secret code.
I recently spent a day rattling around northern New Jersey with my friends Matt and Ross. They’re both serious collectors of vintage 45-rpm records, so a few of our stops were at record shops. At one of those shops, the owner said, “You’re in luck — I just got a big box of old 45s that used to belong to a DJ. He numbered all of the records and kept a list of them, so you don’t even have to dig through all of the vinyl — you can just look at the list and it’ll be easy to pull out the ones you want.”
The DJ’s old 45s turned out to be mostly mainstream hits from the 1970s and ’80s, which is not what Matt and Ross were looking for (they’re more into obscure soul/R&B material from the 1950s and ’60s). The list, however, was more intriguing. It was handwritten on the pages of a ledger and featured all sorts of colored highlighting and other symbology that amount to a secret code — a complex record of records.
I liked the ledger so much that I would have offered to purchase it, but it was clear that the shop owner wanted it to remain with the 45s. I did manage to photograph most of its pages, however. Here’s the first one:
As you can see, the list begins with what the DJ considered “slow” songs, numbered sequentially from 0 to 39. It’s jam-packed with idiosyncrasies, including the following:
It looks like the DJ may have started with No. 1 and then added No. 0 on the top line after the fact.
Some of the songs are highlighted in yellow (including all the odd-numbered songs beginning with No. 7), others in pink (including all the even-numbered songs from Nos. 8 through 28), and others not at all.
Song No. 38 is crossed out in turquoise.
For the vast majority of the entries, all the words are hyphenated. Although the lettering was done in black ink, some of the hyphens appear in red.
Similarly, almost every word, name, number, and year on the page is underlined — sometimes in black, sometimes in red. (Oddly, the underlining for the years running down the far-right column abruptly stops after song No. 31.)
Speaking of the years, no year is listed for Nos. 17, 23, and 36.
The recording artists’ names appear in parenthesis. Most of the parens are red; it’s hard to be sure, but I think some of them are black.
Although the page is already headed “Slow,” each individual song is likewise described as “Slow” — except for Nos. 20, 27, and 33, which are tagged “Waltz.”
Yowza! I think it would be fair to say that this DJ had some seriously obsessive tendencies (not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course). I’m particularly fascinated by all the hyphens and underlines — so endearingly strange. Even the “Slow” header at the top of the page is underlined and flanked by hyphens!
Here’s the next page: