Plastic Migration Moment of Horror
In which I have a vinyl related panic. Plus add stuff to a book in progress.
I love my vinyl, and I’m having fun slowly rebuilding and expanding my collection of records. Every purchase is an opportunity to revive old memories or discover new sounds. There is something very tactile and satisfying about the vinyl listening experience that CD or digital just can’t replicate.
A few months ago I started a little project to pick a random album from my vinyl collection for each letter A-Z and share my thoughts about it on the various socials. It’s been fascinating to see which albums have resonated with folks, and the memories they have shared along the way.
As I write this we are at the letter Q - for Quicksilver Messenger Service’s double Anthology album from 1973.
Working through the collection and finding albums to pick has made me take a closer look at the condition of the various albums I have, which led to looking up some YouTube videos on the best ways to look after and store your vinyl collection.
So imagine my horror after watching this video to discover that I was committing a serious sin.
Several of the albums in my collection were indeed housed in the dreaded thick gauge PVC sleeves, some of which were yellow and aged. Apparently, over the years these sleeves can produce a gas that will pass through the cardboard and paper of the sleeves and deposit thin layers of plastic directly on the records’ surface. This subsequent mottling is known as plastic migration and will ruin a record.
Having discovered this I immediately went and extracted every record I had that was housed in a PVC sleeve, trashed the sleeve, and inspected the records. And sure enough, I found a couple that had fallen victim to this phenomenon that I’d never heard of until last week.
The next step was back to some online research to find out what the best way to store albums is these days. It turns out it’s pretty much the same as bagging and boarding my comics. Specialized inner sleeves with a light paper backing that doesn’t scratch records when you pull them out, and chemically inert clear outer covers for the sleeves.
A box of the appropriate goodies arrived this week, and I’m now in the process of re-sleeving all my vinyl - I don’t know if it will make any album sound better, but now they will be better protected for future listening.
Other Stuff
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Brabazon Bits
Just because I needed more to do with deadlines fast approaching, I decided this week that I needed to add another chapter to the Brabazon book. When I set out to write the book I made a conscious decision that this wasn’t going to be a highly technical book on how the aircraft was built - what I wanted to do was tell the Brabzon’s story, not just from a why and how she was built aspect, but also around the cultural, political, and social aspect as well.
While working on the book so far I’ve made references to some of the current events happening around the time, such as the impact of the great blizzard of the winter of 1947, but what was missing was any real mention of just how impoverished the UK was in the decade after World War II. So into the outline has gone a placeholder for a chapter currently titled ‘Britain in the Brabzon Years.’
With the research on the actual aircraft almost complete, I think I’ve just opened up another research rabbit hole to go down.
Pages and Screens
Books Read in 2024 - “Innovation” by Peter Ackroyd
A disappointing end to Ackroyd’s ambitious six-volume history of England. What started, and for most of its run, was a brilliant engaging, and highly readable series that just fizzles out in an almost ad-hoc rambling series of vignettes and a who-followed-who scorecard of parliamentary turnover that borders on the tedious.
Aiming to cover the whole of the twentieth century in a single volume is a tall order, but what is left out is surprising while space is given over to apparent irrelevant asides.
Maybe having personal experience of the events covered in the last third of the book left me with a feeling of over-familiarization and a realization of what was being skimmed over, but this felt like the author was just going through the motions to get the series completed.
Bond Briefings
The new bi-weekly James Bond Lexicon newsletter is off to a great start with more subscribers than we could have hoped for over the first few weeks. - Thanks to everyone who has subscribed.
In our latest issue, we ask What’s He Looking At? As I expand on some recent Dr. No observations, pay tribute to a lost friend's 007 contributions, and look at the adventures of a lady-spy with a familiar name.
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Before They Were Beatles Updates
The Forgotten Beatles first episode is now online. We kick things off with a look at Pete Best’s story both before and after his time as a Beatle. - You can give it a listen right HERE
The January issue of the Before They Were Beatles newsletter is out now, in which we look at the educational establishment that shaped the lives of half of The Beatles. - The Liverpool Insitute High School for Boys. If you don’t want to miss out on the expanded story of the early Beatles history, you can sign up for a subscription below.
Weekly Web Round-Up
Batman On The Cover - The journey through Batman’s comics publishing history continues this week we continue through October 1968, with reprint issues from Denmark, France, Germany, and Italy
I like the German cover from this week’s entries. A straightforward design that invokes a more simplistic retro-Golden Age art style. (Although it looks to me that based on body proportions here Batman and Robin are about the same size physically.)
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See you next time
Alan J. Porter
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