Clean and orderly singles collection

After Christmas I cleaned all of the new albums I had acquired since last summer and shifted my records to file them into their proper places. Shifting my records (or books) is a job I loathe, and new vinyl sits on my floor for months until I get around to putting it all away. Once motivated to get down to work with my new LP’s, I decided to tackle a job that I had been procrastinating for decades.

And that is the maintenance of my singles collection.

I have to admit, that before I embarked on the job my singles shelving was rather neat. My singles are arranged alphabetically in the same way I organize my album collection. The Beatles and Beatles-related artists are ordered first, followed by all other artists. Thus my singles collection starts with 45’s by Badfinger, then the Beatles, followed by (this is merely a small selection of artists) the Elastic Oz Band, George Harrison, Chris Hodge, Mary Hopkin, John Lennon, Julian Lennon, Jackie Lomax, Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, Billy Preston, Radha Krishna Temple (London), Ravi Shankar, Stairsteps, Ringo Starr, the Sundown Playboys, James Taylor, Trash, Doris Troy and Lon and Derrek Van Eaton. Artists who have nothing to do with the Beatles are organized in alphabetical order next. I had separated all picture sleeves from the records and stored them in sealed plastic see-through bags (what I prefer to call “envelopes”). The discs that were in those picture sleeves were cleaned and stored in their own envelopes. However, only up to a point.

In the summer of 1993 I embarked on a singles cleaning project. The job was so tedious that I only got to the beginning of my George Harrison singles then stopped. So while all my Badfinger and Beatles singles–at least those I had in my collection up till the summer of 1993–were all cleaned and stored in sealed envelopes–the rest of my 45’s remained in open sleeves, vulnerable to drifting dust.

In spite of this storage environment, some of the singles remained remarkably free of dust, yet a small minority were filthy. The dirty ones tended to be in groups where they were more exposed. Also, the singles on the bottom shelf I found to be dirtier than those on the top or middle shelves.

Over the past three decades since I started my cleaning project I have acquired quite a lot of new singles. Where have I stored them? They have been kept in a number of places, such as filed within the gaps on my singles shelves. Some of them were on a bottom shelf below my vinyl albums, some were in piles in front of my two record players yet most were in a pile on the floor next to my shelving. Every one of them is now in its proper place.

I have spent several hours each day over the past four weeks picking up where I left off 31½ years ago. As I cleaned I enjoyed listening to new LP’s that I had not yet listened to (and some of them too went back three decades).

I truly needed to retire in order to get this job done. Finally, today, I finished. For the first time in many decades I have both a wholly ordered and clean album and singles collection.

This is the shelf I use to store my singles. The Beatles and Beatles-related picture sleeves are in the metal boxes on the top left. Their accompanying vinyl singles, as well as any singles that did not come with picture sleeves, are in the boxes that start just a bit over halfway across the top row. Singles for artists unrelated to the Beatles start on the bottom row about halfway in.

The shelves housing the singles have dividers indicating the artist. I do not divide the picture sleeves this way.

Before I embarked on my cleaning project, I had a bit of room on the bottom row of my singles shelves. I soon realized as I processed my new singles that they wouldn’t all conveniently fit there. The shelves I use for my vinyl albums had an empty area, below The Beatles in Mono box set, where I had stored some of my new singles. That shelf has ample room to store six metal boxes, so all of my singles that do not fit in the other room can go here. The box on the right has only a dozen 45’s in it so there is plenty of room for new arrivals.