I buy record collections in Los Altos and Los Altos Hills, and I come to the house — including up the hill, where the driveway is long and the collection is usually in a room nobody has opened since the kids left.
Email Oliver → How selling worksDowntown Los Altos has a lot of things. A record shop is not one of them, and it hasn't been for a long time.
If browsing is what you're after, the honest answers are The Record Man on El Camino in Redwood City, Vinyl Solution in San Mateo, or a proper expedition to Streetlight Records in San Jose. None of them are around the corner.
But Los Altos is one of the better towns on the Peninsula for records, and it has nothing to do with retail. This is a place where people bought houses in the fifties and sixties and stayed in them, where the lots are big enough that nothing ever had to be thrown away, and where a collection assembled between 1960 and 1980 could sit undisturbed in a garage or a converted den for forty years afterwards. In the Hills, add a barn.
That's the trade here. The good records in this town aren't in a shop window; they're in a cabinet behind an exercise bike, and somebody is about to decide what to do with them.
Most of the Los Altos collections I get asked about have spent a long stretch somewhere unheated. That is worth talking about honestly, because it changes what things are worth and people would rather know before than after.
Heat is the enemy, not dust. A garage that gets to 110° in August will warp records and make jackets brittle. Dust washes off. A warp doesn't.
Damp is worse. Ring stains on the jacket, foxing on the inner sleeve, and that smell — those are the things that turn a valuable record into a $2 record, and they happen from the outside in.
Weight kills sleeves. Records stored flat, in a stack, for years, press the bottom jackets into ruin. Stored upright and snug, they survive almost anything.
None of that means don't call. It means I'll look at the actual condition rather than quoting off a title list, and that you should get them out of the garage and somewhere with a stable temperature whether you sell them to me or not.
Send a rough count and a few phone photos of the spines where they stand. Don't sort them, don't clean them, and don't throw out a single jacket — those three instincts are the ones that cost money, and all three feel helpful at the time.
I come to you, look at the records where they are, and go away and research the pressings properly. Then you get one number with the reasoning attached, in writing, and all the time you want to think about it. If a collection deserves an auction house rather than me, I'll tell you that instead of quietly buying it cheap.
The full version is here, including what happens when you're clearing a house against a deadline, which is how a good share of these conversations start.
No shop, so the stock lives in the eBay store and ships anywhere. Everything is graded to the Goldmine standard, disc and sleeve separately, cleaned before it's photographed, and researched down to the deadwax.
The grading guide explains the standard; the feedback page is where buyers say whether I applied it honestly.
I do, and I come to the house — Los Altos and Los Altos Hills both. I'm based in Palo Alto, about twenty minutes away, so there's no minimum worth arguing about and no reason for you to load anything into a car.
No. The nearest counters are The Record Man on El Camino Real in Redwood City and Vinyl Solution in San Mateo, and the nearest large one is Streetlight Records in San Jose.
Not necessarily, and dust is the least of it. Heat warps discs and makes jackets brittle, damp stains sleeves, and stacking flat crushes the ones at the bottom. Records stored upright in a dry corner often come through decades looking far better than anyone expects.
It depends on what's there, and I'll be straight with you about which I'm proposing before I make an offer. What I won't do is take the good twenty and leave you with the problem of the other four hundred without saying so.
Water damage, records with scratches you can feel with a fingernail, big-box classical and easy-listening sets, and modern repressings of records that exist as originals. I'd rather say that on a web page than in your living room.
I buy collections across the Peninsula. There are pages for Palo Alto · Menlo Park · Mountain View · Redwood City, and the towns beyond those are listed on the selling page.