The Quantified Shelf

The 27 steps to alphabetizing your record collection (with your 5-year-old)

OJ: Original Jedi
OJ: Original Jedi

1: Fun!

2: Van Dyke Parks. D? P? Is that a last name?

3: This Dillinja/Lemon D split single is gonna kill me.

3b: “Dad, I need an ‘N’ record.”

4: Is there an app for this?

5: I could put a piano in there.

6: Sell it all.

7: Dump it all.

8: Oh, then I’d have to sort the sheet music.

9: No, this is fun.

10: Take break to tweet a lot.

11: Yeah, I need this LP of John Cheever reading The Swimmer.

12: First sighted accidental second copy: Ray Davies’ Return to Waterloo.

13: I worked for Tower Records for 7 years full time. It’s probably best I never actually worked in a Tower store.

14: I own a heap of hip-hop 12″s but playing them interrupts this activity even more than tweeting does.

15: Whatever happened to [____]. Do not hit search. Do not hit search. Do not hit search.

16: Whew, hit a stack of Ns. Was worried the movers lost a crate (back in 2003 when I moved back to San Francisco).

17: I don’t think Randy Weston owns this many Randy Weston albums.

18: There were 4 people in Destiny’s Child at some point?

19: Note on Billy Childish LP says art’s inside it. Assigned him a drawing. We ended up not being able to print it.

20: Why’s this Ornette Coleman sleeve empty? (Whew, found it.) (And why’s “Ornette” not in my laptop’s dictionary?)

21: 5-year-old is making a temporary post-it sign. Says: “Dad, are there any silent letters in ‘various’?”

22: 5-year-old plays electric piano along to Nav Katze remix album, turns it into a Herbie Hancock album.

23: Done. (For now.) I still need to sort through this huge stack of WTF.

24: And then I’ll need to, you know, sort within each letter/category.

25: And, er, then on to the 7″s, 10″s and, er, CDs …

26: Then get ’em into a spreadsheet.

27: And then back to MP3/FLAC/etc., which is mostly what this was an exercise to avoid.

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