When I finally walked into the basement of Maynard Bertolet’s stone house, I should have felt claustrophobic, but I didn’t. Before me were thousands of vinyl pop and classical albums he had collected over more than 50 years and nestled in row after row of evenly spaced five-foot shelves.
I had come face to face with the crème de la crème of his collection.
Someone had placed handwritten signs distinguishing the pop and classical albums, all of which were in plastic sleeves. I’m sure Bertolet never needed signs to find a Mozart or a Frank Sinatra or a Nat “King” Cole. He had grouped the pop albums near the stairway and classicals farther back in the low-ceiling room, with walk-through spaces in between the shelving. At the end of one row was a stool that I assumed was used for browsing or searching.
He had organized them efficiently, not haphazardly or messy the way hoarders’ houses look on TV. As I ventured inside the basement, I quickly spied a group of Broadway cast albums to my right, and saw the name Pearl Bailey in a play titled “House of Flowers” that I was unfamiliar with (It was penned by Truman Capote in the 1950s). The cast album was still in its original cellophane, unopened.
The collection was part of an auction at Bertolet’s house on a rainy day that drew more vendors than I had expected. The weather forecast warned of something akin to a monsoon, but all we got was a steady rain. Inside, too many of us stood in the cramped house as one auctioneer sold kitchen and household items, furniture, clocks and knickknacks, while outside, another auctioneer sold small items on a patio.
Waiting were three floors upstairs with tons of books, furniture and other items. The upstairs was a maze of meandering steps leading to rooms that felt like crannies in a cupboard. Each contained built-in bookcases filled with books ranging from mysteries to biographies, along with cassette tapes, movies and CDs.
I had never heard of Bertolet, but when I saw photos of his album collection on the auction-house website, I was obviously intrigued. The auction house called it “by reputation one of the largest of its kind in existence, with many thousands of both published and unpublished recordings of the early and mid-20th C. The record collection will be offered as an entirety.” That may have been an exaggeration of it being the largest, but the auctioneer was trying to sell a collection that he knew was going to be hard to off-load.
Googling, I found a 2006 interview with Bertolet talking about his collection. He died in August.
At the time, the collection consisted of 250,000 recordings – some commercial, some private, some released, some unreleased. Bertolet was apparently an avid enthusiast of Al Jolson and Mario Lanza, and had all of their commercial recordings, along with those of such people as Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Burl Ives, Maria Callas and Barbra Streisand.
He started collecting in 1947 when he was a teenager, Bertolet said in the interview. He wasn’t much of a collector until he saw “The Jolson Story,” and was awed by the singer’s voice. “Using my high-school lunch money, I bought all the Jolson 78s that came out,” he said in the interview.
Then he heard Lanza sing in the movie “The Midnight Kiss” in 1949 and was again enamored with a lovely voice. Bertolet spent the next 58 years collecting recordings, including Big Band, Stephen Foster and more.
He also collected musical accoutrements. At auction was an early phonograph called the Columbia Graphophone, along with Columbia wax cylinders with early recordings (I’ve picked up some cylinders along with early Edison phonographs at auction over the years). Near the stairs in the basement was an upright Edison phonograph.
Some of Bertolet’s gems, as noted in the article: first live performances of the Metropolitan Opera from 1899 to 1902, Frank Sinatra recordings, and first and last recordings by Judy Garland.
Bertolet also was an editor of the Lizzie Borden Quarterly for several years. The publication was founded around 1990 for fans of the woman who was acquitted of charges of killing her father and stepmother with an ax in Fall River, MA, in 1892. He also wrote articles about the trial.
He was also a former president of the Mario Lanza Institute in Philadelphia, and author of a self-published book about Jolson and Philadelphia. He also collaborated or shared recordings and photos on several compilations.
In the interview, Bertolet said that he would like to leave his vast collection to a museum or university to share with the world. The treasure trove at his house seemed to be complete, so it was hard to tell if anything had been donated. The auctioneer believed that nothing had been removed.
There were so many books in each room that the auctioneer was selling them room by room, and not in individual groups for those of us who wanted a few choice ones. The furniture and small items were sold individually. One room of books went for about $30 to $40.
The auctioneer was saving the basement album collection for last. He even mentioned that he was willing to allow the buyer to break through a door to get all the albums out. The auction house was willing to reconstruct the door, he said.
I wasn’t around when the vinyl collection sold, but I’m pretty sure that someone bought it. I’m also sure it didn’t bring in as much as it is worth.
About thirty-five years ago Mr. Bertolet had heard that I had a collection of LP records inherited from my mother, who died in 1969, and which I had moved to North Carolina in about 1971. When Mr. Bertolet contacted me in about 1978 I was living in a Philadelphia suburb, and I had started thinking about selling the records because I had no leisure time during which I might listen to them. Maynard was interested because he had heard that my mother had made it her hobby to translate the language of the songs from Italian (through German, her native tongue) to English … and she had left the translations in typewritten form inside the jackets of the records. It had taken me the better part of a year to carry the boxes up to the second floor, where I had constructed a huge six by eight foot set of shelves to accommodate the extremely heavy collection.
I thought that Maynard was at risk of a heart attack, he was so excited when he arrived to take possession of the collection, but he and several of his friends were able to carry them back down the stairs. They had found their way to a good home, and my mother’s efforts had not been in vain.