Do Not Sell at Any Price Quotes

“On a good day, even writing can feel like a form of collecting—of gathering words, images, and ideas and arranging them in an order that feels right.”
― Amanda Petrusich, Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records

“Even now, I'm not sure there's a way to accurately recount the experience without sounding dumb and hammy. I wanted to curl up inside the record; I wanted to inhabit it. Then I wanted it to inhabit me: I wanted to crack it into bits and use them as bones. I wanted it to keep playing forever, from somewhere deep inside my skull. This is how it often begins for collectors: with a feeling that music is suddenly opening up to you.”
― Amanda Petrusich, Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records

“He already had a sense of the ways in which white blues fans were unduly aroused by the supreme otherness of black, prewar blues musicians.”
― Amanda Petrusich, Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records

“In 1969 the Swedish folklorist Bengt Olsson and his partner, Peter Mahlin, spent a summer loitering around Beale Street in Memphis, interviewing and recording blues musicians. I'm certain it was hot, thankless work. In 1970, Olsson compiled some of those interviews into a short, now long-out-of-print book called Memphis Blues. In it, Olsson recounts a conversation with the guitarist Furry Lewis, who was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1893 and come up playing blues with the Memphis legend W.C. Handy. Olsson never did much editorializing on the page - he just presented the material he'd collected - but there's a quote toward the end of the Lewis chapter that's become lodged permanently in my cortex, repeating endlessly like a koan: 'The people I used to play around with, they all done died out,' Lewis tells Olsson. 'And sometimes I get scared myself, 'cause it look like to me it gonna be mine next. You know, it's a funny thing, but you can do a thing for a-many years, and all of them die out and you still here,' he continued. 'And you know, that's more than a notion if you come up and just think about it.'

I had thought about it. And I knew they were all still here, together, etched into shellac, tucked into sleeves.

I could hear them.”
― Amanda Petrusich, Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records

“It is invariably oneself that one collects,”
― Amanda Petrusich, Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records

“Collecting anything requires a singularity of focus, but 78 collecting demands an almost-inhuman level of concentration. There is a violence to the search, a dysfunctional aggression that vacillates between repellent and endearingly quirky. It’s intimidating to outsiders, and it feeds on sacrifice.”
― Amanda Petrusich, Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records

“The Phonograph knows more about us than we know ourselves,” Thomas Edison wrote in 1888. “For it retains the memory of many things which we forget, even though we have said them.”
― Amanda Petrusich, Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records

“The first time I bought a record, I remember thinking, I have to see if this band has any other records. And then when I got the other records, I thought, I need to figure out which one came first so I can put them in order. I remember going to friends’ houses and they just had their records anywhere, and it was like, ‘How can you do that? They have to be in order!’ I just spent so much time thinking about the perfect way to put everything in order.”
― Amanda Petrusich, Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records