Of all the books about record collecting, this quirky tale is my favorite. Eric Spitznagel, like many of us, gradually sold off the records of his youth and replaced them with CDs over time. But one night, at age 45, as part of a larger midlife crisis of sorts, he decides he wants to track his old records down and have them again. Not other vinyl copies with the same music on them. He wants to find his own literal, exact records.

The rest of the book is a chronicle of that quest that takes him to record stores around the Chicago area, gigantic and small, and to record collector shows, and to record stores that aren't there anymore.  He spends one whole sleepless night going through the final inventory of a defunct store that was preserved in the owner's brother's basement. How will he know when he finds the right copy? Each one has particular scratches and marks from specific incidents he can recall, and one special one bears the digits of a girl's phone number he wrote on the cover when he was trying to impress her. Which turns out to be the first one he re-finds.

The book is a unique exploration of different types of relationships to the records we collect.  In conversations with people he meets in different stores and swap meets, he hears that some collectors value pristine condition, some (the CD and MP3 people) prefer convenience and durability. The waxed-mustache denizens of a Record Store Day line twitch with the desire for something limited and rare. The sellers in the booths and stores mostly talk about resale value and the cost of storage. But he treasures the ink marks, the mud, the water damage and the scratches, because they are what identify the authenticity of the artefacts when he finds them. Through those objects, he processes his memories and the formative experiences that made him who he was, as he tries to come to terms with who he has come to be.

The book ends in a finale where the author gains access to his childhood home, which he decorates with the original family kitchen table and chairs, suggested and hauled in by his Mom after she develops her own enthusiasm for his project, and an eBay-procured copy of the KISS poster his brother had on his old bedroom wall. I won't reveal what nostalgic food was on the menu, but he shares it with a group of old friends, and they sit around the replica GE three-speed portable record player and listen to the exact copies of the records they listened to as kids. The author's brother arrives, and then later his wife and small son, and he watches as they shed their cynicism about the project and beam with their own delight at artefacts from their pasts.