by Edward Tatnall Canby
Sooner or later every aspiring audio buff, audiophile, hi-fi man, whatever, is likely to make an unsettling discovery concerning his audio software, the stuff he actually plays on his fancy equipment. Namely, that he has be come the owner of a library, and he has to do something about it. Now for some of us this can be downright frightening. You mean--file cards? Maybe, though not necessarily, there are other ways. But any way you look at it, you are faced with some kind of action. Action or chaos.
A library is no more than a long term holding action, a better way to get at what you want to keep around. You either have a library or you have a mess.
And every time you come home with another recording, that mess gets a fraction messier. It's inexorable. And the more enthusiastic your hobby, the sooner you'll get to the crunch. As I figure it, our present Editor should just about be entering that stage at his own place, as if he didn't have enough to do down at the office.
So here comes Can by with soothing balm, words of wisdom and experience--well, at least, plenty of the latter--in case you, too, are getting towards that inevitable crunch point. (Editor's Note: Mr. Canby, sir, I was at that stage before I became Editor! It's a prerequisite.- E.P.) It pays to be philosophical in such cases; you are not the only one in history who has had to face the problem of collecting and organizing. It is a very human occupation and even some birds (real birds) do it. The magpie? They collect objects colored blue, bring them home and play with them, just like so many cassettes. Setting up your library, then, is a practical matter, but it can also be interesting and, of course, gratifying if it works as it ought to. Especially since there are no official professional rules as yet (as there are in book library work) and so if you de vise a system of organization that works well for your needs you can be full of pride.
Some of us are just naturally neat.
Organizational problems never arise because they never get started. We al ways know where everything is. But that's almost inhuman. Most of us, as with check books and double-entry accounting, just do not like neatness via system, any system. That, alas, includes me. It is so much easier just to reach for the record you want than to go look it up somewhere. Reach with one hand for one record, the other for the next, with the least amount of motional energy. And pile up the re cent acquisitions right next to the turntable where you can look at them and choose to taste, right at hand, under your fingers, at arm's length. So easy! So comfortable. And no system at all. I'll bet 95 percent of home hi-fi music is played that way, for a while anyhow. It's the purest luxury.
The danger point arrives when your software, as they said about Victorian children, can be seen but not heard.
You can see it all right- it's every where. But you can't find the blasted record you want to play. You swear it was right on the couch. It isn't there any more. Where is it? As my mother used to say years ago, "Oh, I put all those things in the so-and-so, the key phrase being all those things, a category of chaos no one but my mother could have invented. Like the magpie's blue objects. Anything was better than "all those things." Any thing still is.
If you own no more than a couple dozen LPs and maybe a few cassettes, you can manage. But beware of accumulation. It's cumulative. Let's say (I am trying to put myself into the shoes of a couple million readers), you have your records in a stylish cabinet with a front that closes- but it's al ready full and small heaps and piles are spilling out; it's easier, anyhow, than "losing" them inside the cabinet. And untidy little clusters of mixed cassettes sit here and there (like mine) for lack of any particular systematic way to keep them in good order. They're small and inconspicuous, after all, and mostly black. Just push them together, drop them into a box, and they look very neat, for a while. You may also have assorted open reels of tape, in and out of their boxes, mostly with loose ends dangling and no labels, with half labels, or erased labels- un finished business. All in all, this state of things has become a part of your living, and you are getting accustomed to it. Loose albums, empty record cases, while inner sleeves, and even naked LPs decorate most of the seats in your living room so no one can sit down any more. (Come look at my living room!) On the floor are the records you planned to play last night but didn't--they'll wait. Also the records from the night before last, like stale teacups left after a party. If all this applies to you, then you are indeed heading for trouble. And accumulating more of it every day.
In this syndrome, it gradually be comes clear that the more recordings you put away--that is, figuratively sweep under the rug--the more there are lying around in messy display. You still use the hunt-for-it system, but with increasing frustration. Is it in that pile by the window, or in the stack I pushed under the piano? (Go look under my piano.) Or was that the one I loaned to my sister-in-law last month? Down on your hands and knees, man, and plough through pile after pile until you find the d thing. Or don't, and conclude erroneously that somebody has walked off with it, the slob. Incipient paranoia. It's right there within 10 feet of you. But you can't find it.
Catastrophic Crunch
The ultimate crunch arrives one evening when you give a long groan, grab EVERYTHING and make a huge pile in the middle of the living room floor for drastic reassignment. A week later you have set up your library.
Other than via an almost prissy neatness from the very beginning, know of only one other way to avoid this trouble. Go on the wagon.
Do not ever buy another recording, not an LP, 45, cassette, or open reel.
Recordings anonymous! It helps to commune with someone else who has taken the pledge. After awhile, you get so you can, even in the pitch dark, reach into the same old pile of the same old records and come up with the exact item you want for its 150th playing ... but this is a dream world.
Because if you have a library you can do so much better; you can find the "oldies" and you can also buy the "newies." For that, it's worth the extra effort. I've been making extra efforts for decades, though I still haven't caught up. But then I'm a record reviewer. Even with paid help, my library remains perennially out of control. So I know whereof I speak.
What is a library? Library actually is not too appropriate for our sort of collecting, etymologically speaking, be cause in Latin Tiber means book (livre in French) and so a library is technically, by language, a "bookery." Curious that the french word librairie means bookstore, a collecting-together of books for sale. So does "gallery" in our own current art world; you come to browse and maybe to buy. But the much older and more exact meaning of library is minus the sales aspect and takes us back through organized book collections for two thousand years and more of human history, to the very beginnings of inscribed messages on clay tablets and, even earlier, collections of small clay tokens in various meaningful shapes, now discovered to antedate even writing itself. They, too had to be organized so you could find what you wanted and use it.
Nowadays, we have expanded the library idea to cover anything with a message on it, like a recording, which we want (a) to collect and preserve, (b) to organize and make accessible, and (c) to use. These are the three essentials of any library, public or private, and you can see nicely where you fit in. Libraries are now mostly public but there are and always have been private libraries, collections, of every imaginable size. My father had a distinguished library of books, some rare, many with personal dedications from the author, some first editions, numerous big "complete" sets, and up to 50 handsomely bound volumes.
Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, H.G. Wells, O. Henry--I read through most of them as a kid, just browsing. This was decidedly a private library and so today is my own even larger library of sound recordings, and so is yours. Always the same three essentials, collect, make accessible, and use. But it is the middle one, accessibility, which is the important one.
Audio Accessibility
Maybe I'm using the wrong term here. Is it, instead, a private museum that you have in your assembled hi-fi software? The museum is a much newer institution than the library (basically' 19th century), and it is different, though the two overlap in many ways.
A museum is a collection too, semi re-arrangeable, primarily set up for show, organized to impress an eager audience. So is your hi-fi collection a private museum? I'd say so. You put on a (different) show each time you show off your fi. And you surely want to impress an eager audience, even if only an audience of one. As a "show able" collection yours is definitely museum-like.
Museums, too, are mostly large and public but there are a few private museums and quite a number of ex-private ones, like the Frick in New York and Mrs. Gardner's Museum in Boston, surely the zaniest museum you ever saw, if it still is as it used to be.
Mrs. G. was wealthy, and she collected all right. She built herself a show-off place that must be seen to be believed, a vast Edwardian indoor botanical garden with pool, all iron and glass, where masses of flowers and shrubs and trees (often changed) mixed themselves up with a motley art display. Unique but, what with swimming pool hi fi among the palm fronds ( California) and loudspeakers in the trees ( Florida?), we surely could do roughly the same.
Even without the hoopla, you can have your own little museum, provided you organize it with some sort of system. That's what I'm getting at. Or library, if you wish. Either way, it is better to get started before the crunch comes, if you clearly see that it is, indeed, coming. Take a look around you, as per the above. Yes, things are beginning to slide towards chaos? Are you wading already knee deep in piles of records, or even ankle deep? Magpie Mimicry File cards, I must say, are the final and most ambitious resort, also the most demanding, when all else has proved inadequate. I've had file cards for years, but I got to that stage 'way back, and out of the most dire necessity, having tried just about everything else in turn. I think I can make some useful suggestions, if only to get your mind going, but space is up for now and so I begin, reassuringly, with the most elementary suggestion of all.
You've already put it into practice, un less you are color blind. Memorize your record jacket's front art. And then go look for what you want by shape and color. Especially, like the magpie, for color.
So you spread out your LP records luxuriantly, all over the place, just as already described, and you look for the right color. It's that bright red one with the blue picture in the middle. Or the mottled olive that looks like wall paper. Even better, you can go for portrait identification. The glowering guy with the long curly hair. That leering grin on the pianist who has just had 50 color shots made of him (40 of which will appear on his other records) and he is getting hysterical under the camera's relentless gaze. Did you see the recent Columbia cover of the late George Szell holding up one hand in front of his face to hide it from the camera? That one broke me up. They'll use anything to get your attention today, even the misfires! So much the better. It's that much easier to find the record you want, among the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands that you own, in your own museum.
The trouble with this non-system, though, is that you will have to leave your records out and visible. Other wise it won't work. So I predict that this stage in your collecting life will be short and snappy. "GEORGE, PUT THOSE RECORDS AWAY--don't you know the Smiths are coming for dinner?" That'll be the beginning of the end.
(Source: Audio magazine, Nov. 1978; by Edward Tatnall Canby)
= = = =