EPILOGUE

IN WHICH MY FAVOURITE RECORD DEALER, JULIAN SMITH SIGNS OFF WITH A CAUTIONARY TALE FOR BOTH SIDES OF THE COUNTER…

BEATLES-MAN brings in a shabby, self-made, extremely well-thumbed, photocopied booklet. It’s laid out before me with the expectation that I will share this gentleman’s excitement at finding the 29th label variation of ‘She Loves You’. Initially, I thought it my duty to assist in the quest of studying multiple black and white pictures of Beatles’ record labels on which ‘Northern Songs publishing’ was written over two lines instead of three, or the typeset gap was larger, the font different. I could go on. Twenty-nine times in fact.

At some point I realised that when I did find one of these elusive variations, I was making £4. Consider the time I spent: buying, sorting, then calling in the collector, who will now drink a cup of coffee in my shop, and discuss with me all the other label anomalies he’s found recently – for the next hour.

My point being, at some point you have to realise you’re running a business and deal with this, and similar other countless customers in a certain way. As a fellow record collector I can understand to a point where this chap is coming from, but from a bank manager’s point of view, the man’s a record short of a complete box set.

Perhaps this is where record shop dealers get the ‘grumpy owner’ tag from!

JULIAN LEIGH-SMITH, proprietor of Second Scene Records, Bushey, Hertfordshire.

March 2019