Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium

John Corbett

Duke University Press Softcover $24.95 (264pp) 978-0-8223-6366-8

This celebration of vinyl speaks to the transience of pop culture and its intersection with everyday lives.

For twelve years, music critic, curator, and collector John Corbett immortalized records that never made it as CDS, in his “Vinyl Freak” column for Downbeat magazine. In Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium, he presents those passionately written columns, paired with thoughtful essays on the allure of records, the collecting subculture, and the pleasure and pain of archives.

With its lyricism and metaphors, Corbett’s writing is befitting of a love letter. As he writes, hunting for records felt like “there was a parallel universe of significance as yet unyielding of its