Hi, it's Anne Strain Champs. I was in Vermont recently visiting my family, and one of the pleasures of being there is my dad's book collection.

He's got shelves and shelves of first editions, modern firsts, that's what he collects.

But the thing about his books is that he doesn't read those first editions. I mean, he reads the books.

But what he does is he buys

the first edition, puts it on the shelf, and then he goes to the library and borrows a copy to

read. And I was thinking, what is that about? There's something sort of wonderful and a little

crazy about that. So this hour, on onto the best of our knowledge from PRI,

the art of collecting. For example, take 78 RPM 78s, records that are so old, there are hardly

even any machines left to play them on.

Some of the oldest and rarest were made in Grafton, Wisconsin,

just down the road a piece from us.

And the thing is, they made them just to throw in as kind of freebies with their phonograph cabinets.

But they just happened to record some of the earliest blues music in American history.

And so for collectors, these old 78s are legendary.

And for years, there were these rumors that when the Paramount Records pressing plant in Grafton shut down,

when everybody was laid off, the employees were so aggravated and so upset that they hurled all the deadstock

records, all the records that had been pressed but hadn't been sent out for distribution net.

They just frisbied them into the Milwaukee River. So collectors would talk often about how, you know,

that's why Paramounts were so rare because they were all rotting away at the bottom of the river.

That's Amanda Petrasich.

She discovered 78s when she was working on a story about collectors,

and she kind of got bitten by the collecting bug herself.

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