I buy record collections in Menlo Park, and I come to the house. I'm based one town over in Palo Alto, which in practice means I can be at your door in about ten minutes and you never have to work out how four hundred LPs fit in a car.
Email Oliver → How selling worksNot on Santa Cruz Avenue, not on El Camino. If you want a counter and a browse, you're driving.
The closest is The Record Man at 1322 El Camino Real in Redwood City — about four miles north, and genuinely worth the trip if flipping through bins is the point of the afternoon. After that it's Vinyl Solution in San Mateo, and then you're committing to San Jose or the city.
I'd rather tell you that than pretend the option doesn't exist. What I do is a different thing from what a shop does, and the difference matters most when you're on the selling side.
Because the other thing about Menlo Park is that it's full of records. Allied Arts and Felton Gables and the Willows are streets of houses that people moved into decades ago and never left, and a surprising number of them have a shelf in a back room that stopped being added to somewhere around 1979. Sharon Heights has the same story in a larger floor plan. Those shelves are the actual record trade around here — not a storefront, the houses.
Write to me with a rough count and three or four phone photos of the spines, taken exactly where they sit. I'll tell you whether it's worth either of our time before anyone gets in a car, and if it is, I come to you.
What I'd ask you not to do in the meantime:
Don't throw out the sleeves. A record with no jacket is worth a fraction of the same record with one, and the jacket is the part that looks like packaging.
Don't sort them. The order they're in was built by somebody over years and it tells me things. Alphabetizing a collection destroys information before I've read it.
Don't clean them. A cloth and good intentions do more damage than thirty years of dust. I have an ultrasonic tank and it can wait.
You get one number with the reasoning attached, in writing. You're committing to nothing by asking, and if what you have belongs at an auction house rather than with me, I'll say so. The longer version is here — what I look for, what I turn down, and what happens if you're settling an estate on a deadline.
There's no shop to visit, so everything lives in the eBay store — which means it ships anywhere and you're covered by eBay's buyer protection rather than by my word.
Each record is graded against the Goldmine standard, disc and sleeve separately, by a person who held it under a light. Each one is cleaned before it's photographed, so the photo is the record rather than the record's best day. And the pressing gets researched — deadwax, label, catalogue number — because two copies that look identical on a shelf can be worth $8 and $300.
The grading guide sets out exactly what I mean by each grade, and what buyers say is 1,600-odd people telling you whether I got it right.
I do, and I'll come to the house. I'm based in Palo Alto, so Menlo Park is about ten minutes away — close enough that there's no minimum collection size worth arguing about and no reason for you to do any lifting.
No. The nearest counter is The Record Man on El Camino Real in Redwood City, roughly four miles north, with Vinyl Solution in San Mateo after that. If you want to browse bins rather than sell a collection, go and see them.
Usually within a few days, and faster if there's a deadline on the house. Menlo Park is the next town over, so getting there isn't the constraint — the constraint is doing the research properly once I've seen what's there.
No, and most people don't. That's the job. Two copies of the same album that look identical on a shelf can be worth wildly different money depending on the pressing, and working that out is what I do before I give you a number.
Write anyway. A single box can hold the one record that pays for the whole visit, and I'd rather look and tell you it doesn't than have you throw it out wondering.
Not buying or selling today? The writing is where the enthusiasm lives — Harry Chapin, Emmylou Harris, the Rolling Stones — and there's a page for Palo Alto next door.
I buy collections across the Peninsula. There are pages for Palo Alto · Los Altos · Mountain View · Redwood City, and the towns beyond those are listed on the selling page.