Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt For The World's Rarest 78rpm Records

"The 78 rpm record is “not a medium that invites dabbling,” Amanda Petrusich writes. No kidding. It’s hard to even find a turntable that will play the antique, 10-inch pieces of shellac, let alone lay your hands upon the discs. So when Petrusich finds herself in the Milwaukee River, hunting for 78s downstream from a demolished record pressing plant, you get a sense of both the stubbornness and the scraping desperation of the obsessive hunters of 78s she profiles in her book. Petrusich is an outsider — a young woman among (mostly) older men who admits in the book’s prologue that her job as a music critic in the 21st century made collecting physical records feel like a pose. But she’s an amazingly sympathetic writer with an eye for the detail that makes both her eccentric collectors and the objects they fetishize step out of caricature into idiosyncratic truth."