[78-L] Most disgusting place in your record searches

[Michael Biel]

On 4/5/2011 10:45 PM, Taylor Bowie wrote:
>>
>>   I once bought a stack of excellent 78s from the estate
>> of a man who had died in his apartment and whose body had gone undetected
>> for several days.  The paper sleeves had taken on a terrible odor which,
>> once smelled,  can never be forgotten.
 From Cary Ginell
>   The building should have been condemned. It was so old, there was asbestos in the walls. The smell was musty, but not the good musty - it was a dank mustiness. I began to wonder if I was that much of a collector that I would risk getting cancer breathing in that air. I almost had to hold my breath to stay down there.

This wasn't records but films, and it was an established national film 
archive.  In 1993 the International Assoc of Sound and Audio-video 
Archives and the International Assoc of Film Archives (IASA, FIAF & 
FIAT) met outside Berlin, Germany -- which means were were in the former 
East German area.  (We were at a lakefront retreat that had been built 
in the Nazi era and was used by top level commies until not too long 
before.) We had a field trip into Berlin to several archives and one of 
them was the former East German Film Archive, now run by the unified 
govn't..  After touring the above ground facilities, we were invited 
into the underground negative and color vault, and the chemical smell 
was lethal -- and this group included some of the most experienced film 
archivists in the world.   I have videotape as we all scurried up the 
stairs into the "fresh" Berlin air.  But nothing could capture that 
smell and chewy air.

Mike (no zyklon d jokes please) Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com



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