Estate Sales and Old Junk

Yesterday I went to an estate sale in Morristown, NJ. I have begun going to these sales on the weekends, because I am either interested in buying random ephemera or I am simply bored.

To be honest, it’s hard to tell you exactly what I am hoping to find.

This particular sale was at the home of a man who ran a small recording studio out of his basement, garage and shed. It appeared, from looking at the detritus of what was left, that his main business was corporate clients; all throughout the basement studio, which featured not only a vocal booth but a live room as well, were CDs and tapes of sound libraries, many of which he had either made himself or was using to facilitate his process.

A lot of the clients were corporations that still exist today, television networks and movie studios, and clearly the man who had once owned the space had been successful.

He was said to be a professor, though that part of his life, the educator, didn’t really reveal itself. There was a desk and there were books, but it wasn’t the main attraction. Instead, what you saw was a series of hand-made radio devices, sound recording machines, big blocky metallic objects that looked like they had been made for a nuclear power plant in the 1950’s and 1960’s.