Title: Borders Books & Music Performer Discography Printout
Date: 10/16/1993
Category: Lists
Current Status: Recycled, but still looking for some of this stuff
Back in the day, before the internet was readily available on phones that could fit in your shirt pocket, it was a pain in the butt to find anything you wanted to buy. You had to go to the store and look around at every stinking item until you found what you were looking for... or you went to another store. If you were lucky, the store had things in some sort of order to make it easier to narrow your search for what you wanted. Like bookstores and music stores would put items into groups based on subject and then (hopefully) alphabetize them in some logical way. But, if they didn't have an item, then you might not know it existed.
When searching for music, there was often times this gigantic book full of yellow paper that listed albums and artists. You could browse through this phone book style monstrosity and maybe find something that you didn't know about by a band you liked. Of course, it wasn't updated very often (sometimes a store would have one that was at 5 or more years out of date) and even worse, it did not reflect actual inventory of the store that housed that particular book.
So, when Borders Books & Music started trying to merge their inventory with known catalogs, it was pretty neat. They'd have these little computers set up where you could look up stuff and it would give you some information on a little printout. Granted, it wasn't very thorough and it wasn't always tied to inventory, but it FELT like progress that took us further away from the ancient print catalogs and the needle in a haystack search method.
The front of this thing (below) shows a search I did for "R.E.M" music... my favorite band back in the 90's... this printout is sparse and pretty useless really. I had all this stuff and it didn't even really go too deep into rarities and imports, the stuff I really wanted to find.
On the back is a list I made of all the different versions of "Ring of Fire" that I knew about. I loved "Ring of Fire." It's a great song. I think I was familiar with it first from the Social Distortion cover, but I became a huge fan of the Johnny Cash version. Johnny didn't write it, of course. It was his lovely wife June Carter. But then I started finding all sorts of covers of the song and some of them were pretty wacky. Wall of Voodoo for example, is this long, synthesized, weird version. Zappa covered it, as did Olivia Newton-John and Dwight Yoakum. At any rate, I put a list together to keep with me so that whenever I was at a music store, I could look around for the versions I didn't have yet.
I never did complete this. Maybe I'll go dig around online and see if I can find some more.
Posts
suzanne says: I miss those days.
ReplyDelete"there was often times this gigantic book full of yellow paper that listed albums and artists. You could browse through this phone book style monstrosity and maybe find something that you didn't know about by a band you liked."
ReplyDeleteI worked at the then Soundwarehouse and I remember loathing that evil book. People would come in and go dig through it and actually write down the skew number and want us to order it. Nothing ever came in. People would haunt us for months calling and asking until they just gave up.
THANK GOD FOR THE INTERNET!