Sorting my 45s

Why does this project take so long? Because, true to the site’s name, I can be distracted from my distractions. Could be because I have a dozen little projects going at any one time. Some are ongoing, like this website, others are little side projects that I make up along the way, like yesterday’s decision to suddenly organize my small collection of 45s.

45 RPM singles are a mystery to me – as incredibly careful and protective of my albums as I’ve been, I’ve been just as careless and dismissive of my 45s, for the most part. They haven’t been in any order in decades, many of them have long since been separated from their original sleeves, a few dozen of them were lost in a move in the ’80s and I hardly even cared. They just don’t get the respect you’d think they deserved after playing such an important role in my life.

For the past few years they’ve been stored in boxes not exactly suited to that use, so I decided to finally get some proper storage boxes from BCW and do them right. That meant getting them sorted, deciding what to discard (because some of these are third-hand junk that I’d never put on my turntable), and prettying up what I wanted to keep. (One of those is worth somewhere between $600 and $1300 – but it’s also a part of my personal history and I’d never part with it.)

The records that had picture sleeves, I’m happy to say, I kept much better care of, and yesterday morning I went to the effort of getting them bagged, alphabetized, and even photographed. Unfortunately, I didn’t photograph them in order, so this gallery isn’t in order, but here’s a very random representation of my 45 RPM picture sleeve collection. Click to enlarge and navigate through if you like – at some point I may put them into order.