I'm a record dealer based in Palo Alto. I buy collections across the Peninsula, and I come to the records rather than asking you to carry them to me. What I don't have is a shop with a door on it — which is worth saying in the first paragraph, along with where to go if a door is what you want.
Email Oliver → Selling a collectionThe Midpeninsula is thin on counters. If you want to flip through a wall of sleeves on a Saturday, here is the honest map.
The Record Man — 1322 El Camino Real, Redwood City. About six miles up El Camino from Palo Alto, and the closest thing to a proper dig you'll find without leaving the Peninsula. Decades in business, and the stock has long since outrun the shelving.
Vinyl Solution Records — 151 W 25th Ave, San Mateo. Twenty minutes north, and one of the last locally owned shops on this stretch of the Peninsula.
Past that you're committing to a real trip: Streetlight Records in San Jose, or Amoeba Music on Haight Street in San Francisco, which is less a record store than a weather system.
I send people to all four, which probably reads oddly on a page meant to win your business. But I can't give you a Saturday afternoon of flipping, and pretending otherwise would be the first dishonest thing on this site. If one of them has closed, or I've missed one worth knowing about, tell me and I'll fix this page.
What this town has instead of shops is shelves. Palo Alto is old, settled and comfortable; people here bought records new when records were simply how you bought music, and a great many of those shelves have never moved since. That's the part of the business I'm actually in — not a storefront, but the houses.
You don't have to box up four hundred LPs and drive them anywhere. For anything past a crate or two I come to the collection — Palo Alto, the flats and the hills, and every town either side of it. Records travel badly, and the ones worth money travel worst.
Three things worth knowing before anyone starts carrying boxes to the curb:
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 disposable.
Don't sort them. Whatever order they're in is information. Somebody built that shelf over decades, and the arrangement tells me things.
Don't clean them. Well-meant cleaning does more damage than thirty years of dust. I have an ultrasonic tank for exactly this, and it can wait until they're mine.
You get one number with the reasoning attached, in writing, and you're committing to nothing by asking. If a collection deserves an auction house rather than me, I'll say so instead of quietly buying it cheap. The full version of how that works is here, including what I'm looking for and what I'll turn down.
The inventory lives in my eBay store, which means it ships anywhere and you're covered by eBay's buyer protection rather than by my word alone.
Every record is graded against the Goldmine standard, record and sleeve separately, by a person who has held it under a light. Every record is cleaned before it's photographed, so what you see is the record you get rather than the record after a wipe with a sleeve. And the pressing is researched — deadwax, label, catalogue number — because two copies that look identical on a shelf can be worth $8 and $300.
If you want to know exactly what I mean by VG+, the grading guide spells it out with photographs, including the grades I won't use and why. It's the same standard I apply when I'm the one buying, and what buyers say is 1,600-odd people telling you whether I got it right.
Not a storefront you can walk into, no. I'm a record dealer based in Palo Alto and I work without a shop — I come to collections and I sell online. The nearest counters are The Record Man on El Camino in Redwood City, about six miles north, and Vinyl Solution in San Mateo.
I do. I'll come to the house, look at the records where they sit, and give you one number with the reasoning attached. You're not committing to anything by asking, and you don't need to know what a first pressing is — that's my job.
I come to you. For anything past a crate or two that's the whole point — records are heavy, they're easy to damage in transit, and you shouldn't have to do the lifting before anyone has told you what any of it is worth.
It depends on things you can't see from across the room — the pressing, the deadwax, the condition of the vinyl rather than the cover. That's not a dodge, it's the actual answer, and it's why I research every record before I give you a number instead of quoting by the crate.
Everything I have for sale is listed in my eBay store, hand-graded and photographed after cleaning. It ships worldwide, so being down the road from me is no particular advantage.
Yes — Menlo Park, Atherton, Los Altos, Mountain View, Redwood City, San Carlos, Belmont, San Mateo and the rest of the Peninsula. If your town isn't one I've named, write anyway. For the right shelf of records I've been known to drive a good deal further.
If you're just here for the records rather than a transaction, the writing is where the actual enthusiasm lives — individual pressings, the artists worth the shelf space, and what the deadwax tells you. Recent pieces cover Harry Chapin, Emmylou Harris and Antonio Carlos Jobim.
I buy collections across the Peninsula. There are pages for Menlo Park · Los Altos · Mountain View · Redwood City, and the towns beyond those are listed on the selling page.