ShawneeDispatch.com

A man walked into Dan Phillips' Shawnee store recently carrying a new-found treasure.

An estate sale company made the find and contacted Phillips: an older man who had died left behind a record collection of about 5,000 LP's, all perfectly and precisely indexed. The man in Phillips' store, Vinyl Renaissance, 6471 Quivira, carried the three-inch-thick, hand-typed index for Phillips to peruse.

"We'll buy the whole thing, probably; lock, stock and barrel," Phillips said with a smile.

The collection will be a major addition to the already overstocked shelves of Vinyl Renaissance, which opened recently to sell, buy and trade vinyl records, mostly LP's and some 45s.

The store began as a mail-order business five years ago, with Phillips selling his vinyl finds on a Web site, but is now open to local vinyl groupies on the weekends. Phillips, a Shawnee resident, said he chose the location for the three-block commute and his neighbor, CD Warehouse, a buy, sell and trade CD store.

Phillips said he just "fell into" the business that is now his full-time job; he began buying LP's and 45s out of his own interest, selling them on the Internet now and then. Then, he said, he started buying collections to sell, more and more until he was having trouble finding the space to store everything.

"And then my wife thought I got too many of these things," Phillips said.

That's only if "too many" can be quantified as a basement and two storage units full of LP's. And even though his store shelves are almost completely full, Phillips said he still hasn't unpacked everything from storage.

But he guesses what he does have in the store may already be a larger collection of music albums for sale than can be found anywhere else in the city, especially his collection of classic and opera music.

Phillips uses the weekdays to keep up with the mail orders from his Web site, www.vinylrenaissance.net, and on Saturdays and Sundays the store is open to the public, allowing customers to get a close-up look at what they're buying.

Since beginning his vinyl business, Phillips said he has sold to about 30 countries, with customers ranging in age anywhere from 15 to 60. In addition to the classical and opera collections, the store carries rock and roll, jazz, country and other genres of music, with a few hard-to-find LPs going for as much as $300 and collections for as much as $1,400.

The store also sells new and rebuilt vinyl stereo equipment and record vacuums to clean the records.

No comments

Commenting is turned off for this story.