Vintage Magazine Shop, Brewer St, Soho. The Word, a 2006 edition – ? – with Johnny Cash in the cover, yours for £10.00.
The Collectable Word
by 10 Comments
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Musings on the byways of popular culture
I’m feeling I shouldn’t have thrown mine away. Every single edition.
Nah. You need a shop, with a window and/or an advertising budget and the ability to stock the things for a couple of geological periods before one day when the only person on the planet who wants one of the things enough to spend a tenner on it just happens to walk past, and they spot it, and they’ve got a spare tenner in their pocket right then, and they don’t need the tenner for summat else. By which time you’ve spent 27 million quid on rent, publicity, Pret sandwiches, Costa coffee, electricity and business rates, and you haven’t been able to afford a pint since three weeks after you opened.
The Retail Diet… it could catch on.
Book and Magazine Exchange shop in Notting Hill – an early issue of Word with Bjork on the cover (no. 5?) was £1 without CD.
Good place for old Mojos – £1, though for some reason they pitch old Record Collectors at a whopping £2.
And then the surly geezer behind the counter sidled up and said “Psst, we have a pallet load of the Dido issue out the back if you’re interested. 10p each or a fiver for the complete print run.”
The staff at all the Record & Tape Exchange branches (or whatever their current re-brand is) fascinate me. They have that bored and disinterested manner down to a fine art. They sell their CDs/LPs close to (or sometimes over) new price, yet when you take stuff in to sell/trade they regard each item with practiced disdain like it was radioactive dog shit.
Some years ago I went in the main Notting Hill branch just as it was opening on Monday morning with my teenage son. We were the only customers in the store for some time and listened in uncomfortable silence as the two staff members recounted their weekend escapes in minute detail, their speech liberally sprinkled with “f” and “c” words
Yesterday I read that a Gillian Anderson edition of FHM (RIP) sold for £40.
Yep, all that sounds very familiar, Johnny C.
However, the staff, male and female, who reside in the Basement part are unfailingly polite and engaged and, Lord knows, they get some mighty strange types.
I’m down there all the time.
Yep DD, I often think they must get some prize weirdos and annoying nutters in the London stores. A very different clientele to the regional record shops.
That goes some way to explaining their guarded manner.
…and that should have read “weekend escapades” in my first post.
I did a few trial shifts in MVE in Notting Hill in the mid 90s under the guidance of an surly Richard Ashcroft lookalike who was working on his Nick Kent persona and hoping, with luck, to turn into a fully-fledged Keef clone by the year’s end. Miserable as fuck. I was doing well but canned the day I made polite chit chat with an old hippy who came in to sell a load of Mahavishnu Orchestra albums, polite chit-chat being marginally worse than pilfering from the till or playing something everyone recognised when it was your turn to put a record on the shop stereo.