Richard McCoy

latimes:

Man’s 300,000-plus record collection has no buyers: “Murray Gershenz has spent nearly three quarters of a century collecting the albums that fill the dusty wooden shelves of his two-story West Adams record shop,” Gerrick D. Kennedy writes. “The problem is he can’t rid himself of it.”

His musician son, Irv Gershenz, believes if they were able to get more of their inventory cataloged online, business would pick up. But they’ve had the manpower to log only about 12,000 records. “Here’s someone in Germany; they are only looking at 12,000 records,” said Irv of a buyer interested in the collection. “Imagine how many they could find if the whole collection was there.”

… Gershenz would still like the collection to go to a museum or university, but “the trouble there is they want it free. I’m not in a position to donate it. If I was a very wealthy person, I would.” Though he balks at the idea of splitting up the records to different sellers only looking for one genre, he knows he might be forced to do so.

Gershenz’s asking price has dropped from more than $1 million to $500,000 — a bargain considering the 12,000 records in the online inventory alone are worth $360,000.

Photo: Murray Gershenz. Credit: Richard Parks