Rockwell

Well, it’s a great name for a donor to a popular music archive and John Rockwell, for decades a leading critic at the New York Times (1972-2006), has been a major contributor of thousands of great recordings to ARC.  

That’s to say we just finished packing up the last of the John Rockwell’s recordings. If you remember last year, we acquired and cataloged his 4,056 rock, pop, modern classical and experimental LPs and donated his 12,000+ classical LPs to the Internet Archive to be digitized.  This time we’ve pulled the CDs off the shelves and sorted out music-related books.  That’s his CD room above before the pickup. Below, neatly packed up and labeled at NARC (the New ARC) and ready to be shelved and cataloged. 

With all we have to do at the new building it will be a while before we get around to cataloging everything.  It’s a lot of stuff. This batch numbers 400 books, 7,000+ CDs and boxes of very rare video and cassettes. Again, we’ll be sending off the 12,000+ Classical CDs to the Internet Archive in San Francisco.  They’ll be more donated in the future as John goes through a lot of his favorites that he wants to keep around for a while.  And may I add that this is the very first collection that we’ve brought to the ARC’s permanent new home in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

PS: Here’s one of the Melodia flexidiscs from the USSR we found in this collection…