Redwood City is the one town on this stretch of the Peninsula that still has a real record shop, and you should go to it. This page is about the other thing — what to do when what you have is a collection rather than an afternoon.
Email Oliver → How selling works1322 El Camino Real. Decades in business, and the stock long ago outran the shelving — which is exactly what you want from a shop like this.
If you want to spend a Saturday flipping, that's where to spend it, and no page I write is going to be a substitute for it. Half the pleasure of records is the finding, and the finding needs bins.
So why is this page here at all? Because buying and selling are not the same activity, and a shop is built for the first one.
When you're selling a collection, a counter asks you to do the work first: box four hundred records, get them into a car, carry them in, and wait while somebody assesses them with other customers waiting. Records are heavy, they're easy to damage in transit, and the whole trip happens before anyone has told you what you have. That's the part I do differently — I come to the collection, look at it where it sits, and research the pressings before I put a number to it.
Both things can be true. Go and browse at the shop; call me when it's a collection.
I'm in Palo Alto, six miles down El Camino, so getting to you is not the hard part of this. Woodside Plaza, Mount Carmel, Farm Hill, the downtown flats — all of it is a short drive and none of it involves you lifting anything.
Before you do anything else, three things not to do:
Don't throw out the sleeves. The jacket is the part that looks disposable and it's frequently half the value.
Don't sort them. The order somebody kept them in is information about what they were collecting and how carefully.
Don't clean them. Well-meant cleaning does more harm than decades of dust. I have an ultrasonic tank for that and it can wait until they're mine.
Then send a rough count and a few photos of the spines where they stand. You get one number with the reasoning attached, in writing, and no obligation at all — including the reasoning for the records I'm not offering much for, which is usually the part people actually want explained. The full version is here.
I don't have bins, so I'm not competing for your Saturday. What I have is an eBay store where every record is graded to the Goldmine standard, disc and sleeve separately, cleaned before it's photographed, and researched down to the deadwax — which is a different proposition from flipping through a shop, and better suited to the times you know exactly which pressing you're after.
The grading guide sets out the standard in detail. The feedback page is 1,600-odd buyers saying whether the record that arrived matched what I wrote about it.
Yes — The Record Man, at 1322 El Camino Real, and it's the best walk-in option on this part of the Peninsula. If browsing is what you want, go there rather than reading the rest of this page.
Mostly weight and information. A counter needs you to box the collection and carry it in before anybody has looked at it, and the assessment happens while you stand there. I come to the records, look at them where they sit, and research the pressings before I give you a number — which takes longer and is the reason the number comes with reasoning attached.
All of it, and the towns either side. I'm in Palo Alto, about six miles south, so this isn't a trip I have to think about.
Yes. If a collection deserves an auction house rather than me, I'll say so rather than quietly buying it cheap. I'd rather lose the purchase than have someone find out afterwards what they had.
Jazz, soul, blues, rock, folk, Latin, gospel and the odd thing nobody has a category for. What I turn down is 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 buy collections across the Peninsula. There are pages for Palo Alto · Menlo Park · Los Altos · Mountain View, and the towns beyond those are listed on the selling page.