Have you ever come across a moment in life where you’ve asked yourself, “What am I getting myself into?”  One of those moments for me was last fall when I hauled back home over 1000lbs of 78rpm records.

I was immediately hooked on the mystery of  flipping through records by artists I never knew when I came across 100 78rpm records on Craigslist earlier last year. I was curious to find a few more and began looking.

One afternoon Google Reader alerted me with a seller from Gibsons, BC, who was unloading a massive collection of over 2000+ 78rpm records. I was terrified and curious to see his collection.

Of course, at this point I asked myself a few questions:

a) What does 2000 78rpm record physically look like?

b) Where am I going to put them

c) How the heck am I going to transport them back home

Instead of answering these questions, I hopped on the first ferry to Gibsons.

The records were located on a surreal beach front property on the edge of Gibsons.  The view from the property was spectacular.

The records belonged to the seller’s father who passed away. He was an absolute pack rat and acquired his collection by trading with other music aficionados. All the records were stored away in milk crates and covered in dust.

It took 40 minutes to load all of them into my truck. With every box of records I put in my truck, I wondered at how they would fit in my garage.  The entire collection lowered my truck by at least an inch.

So what sort of records did we haul away? The ones that peaked my interest were the multilingual records in French, Russian and Chinese. Most of these appeared to date back to the 1940’s with some as far back as the early 1900’s. I’m excited to listen to these recordings, some of which are nearly a century old. We’ll be sharing them with our readers on Tune Tuesdays.

Below are a few snaps of Gibsons and a windy boardwalk we checked out during our visit.