I buy record collections in Mountain View and come to the house, and I sell hand-graded vinyl to buyers anywhere. Castro Street lost the shop where you used to be able to do either of those things in person, and nothing has replaced it.
Email Oliver → How selling worksBookBuyers sat at 317 Castro Street for years, taking in used books and used records over the same counter. It left downtown in 2016 and the town has been without since.
That's the specific hole this page is written into. If you live in Mountain View and you have records to sell, the walk-in option that existed a decade ago isn't there any more, and the nearest counters now are The Record Man on El Camino in Redwood City, Vinyl Solution in San Mateo, or Streetlight Records in San Jose.
All three are worth visiting, and I'd rather you knew about them. But all three also require the same thing: that you box up the collection, get it into a car, carry it in, and stand there while somebody looks at it with a queue behind you. That's a lot of work to do before anyone has told you what you have.
I do it the other way round. I come to the records, look at them where they sit, and go away and research the pressings before I say a number.
Mountain View collections tend to come in two shapes, and they're worth different amounts of my attention in different ways.
There are the old ones — the Old Mountain View and Cuesta Park houses where somebody built a shelf across the sixties and seventies and it's still standing. And there are the modern ones, assembled since the vinyl revival by somebody who has now been transferred, or is moving into a smaller place, and bought carefully for fifteen years.
I buy both. The second kind surprises people — they assume "not old" means "not worth anything" — but a well-chosen modern collection of pressings that are already out of print can be worth more per record than a wall of sixties easy listening. Condition and choice beat age nearly every time.
Either way: don't sort them, don't clean them, don't bin the jackets. Send a rough count and a few photos of the spines where they stand, and I'll tell you honestly whether it's worth a visit. The full process is here.
Everything for sale is in the eBay store. It ships anywhere, so living four miles away is no particular advantage — but it does mean you're covered by eBay's buyer protection rather than by my word, which is the right way round for a stranger.
Every record is graded to the Goldmine standard, disc and sleeve separately. Every record is cleaned before it's photographed. Every pressing is researched — deadwax, label, catalogue number — because the difference between two copies that look identical on a shelf can be $8 against $300.
Here's exactly how I grade, and here's what buyers say about whether the record that arrived matched it.
Not since BookBuyers left Castro Street in 2016. The nearest counters are The Record Man on El Camino Real in Redwood City, Vinyl Solution in San Mateo, and Streetlight Records in San Jose.
I do, and I come to you. I'm based in Palo Alto, so Mountain View is fifteen minutes away — close enough that there's no minimum size worth arguing about.
Often more than people expect. A carefully chosen modern collection of pressings that have since gone out of print can be worth more per record than a wall of sixties easy listening. Condition and choice matter more than age.
Usually, yes — tell me the date in the first email rather than at the end. What I won't do is rush the research and then hand you a number I've padded for my own risk, so an honest deadline gets you an honest answer about whether I can meet it.
45s and box sets yes, especially when they traveled with the LPs. CDs only selectively — the market is much thinner — but mention them rather than assuming.
I buy collections across the Peninsula. There are pages for Palo Alto · Menlo Park · Los Altos · Redwood City, and the towns beyond those are listed on the selling page.