Culture July 24, 2014

In Do Not Sell at Any Price, Amanda Petrusich visits the secretive, insular world of 78rpm collectors. The oldest version of the record, these 10-inch, two-song albums are increasingly hard to track down. Finding a matching turntable is a feat in itself. The scarcity has kept the number of hobbyists small, and their devotion to “the treasure hunt” fanatical. As Petrusich explains in the prologue to the book, excerpted here, her interest in 78s began as a nostalgic protest against today’s listening culture—“an antidote to the twenty-first-century deluge”—and culminates in her own self-initiation into the cult. If collecting is a