Goldmine’s Rock’n Roll 45RPM Record Price Guide (book)

Es­ti­mated reading time is 4 minutes.

THE SE­RIES OF AR­TI­CLES about the books I have pub­lished have a loose chronology and nar­ra­tive that makes the most sense if read in this order:

1.  Rock & Roll Record Al­bums Price Guide (1985)
2.  Elvis Presley Record Price Guide (1985)
3.  A Touch Of Gold – Elvis Presley Price Guide (1990)
4.  Gold­mine’s Price Guide to Col­lectible Record Al­bums (1st edi­tion, 1991)
5.  Gold­mine’s Price Guide to Col­lectible Jazz Al­bums (1992)
6.  Gold­mine’s Rock’n Roll 45RPM Record Price Guide (1994) 
7.  Gold­mine’s Price Guide to Col­lectible Record Al­bums (5th edi­tion, 1996)
8.  Blues And Rhythm & Blues 45s Of The ’50s (2000)

Links to these ar­ti­cles can be found at the end of this article.


MY SECOND BOOK for Krause was Gold­mine’s Rock’n Roll 45RPM Record Price Guide, pub­lished in 1990. As sales of my first Gold­mine book had far ex­ceeded Krause’s ex­pec­ta­tions, they heeded my ad­vice and greatly ex­panded the size of the book: whereas the album book had been a miserly 384 pages, the sin­gles guide was 604 pages! And it was all rock & roll!!!

 While I fo­cused the book on es­tab­lished and col­lectible artists of the ’50s and ’60s, I did in­clude some of the more highly col­lected artists of the ’70s and ’80s. The book ba­si­cally covered:

  45 rpm singles
  45 rpm pic­ture sleeves
  45 rpm
extended-play (EP) albums

I in­cluded se­lect pro­mo­tional 45 rpm sin­gles, compact-33 rpm sin­gles and pic­ture sleeves, and 12-inch sin­gles. The opening para­graphs of the in­tro­duc­tion stated:

“Whether you are just step­ping into this hobby or have been in­volved fa­nat­i­cally for a decade, you prob­ably have ques­tions con­cerning artists, ti­tles, sleeves, values, etc. The an­swers are, for the most part, blowin’ in the wind. That is, they are all out there, they just have not been col­lected into a single tome of ref­er­ence for easy access.

This is not the bible for record collectors.

It is not the blue book of vinyl junkies.

This book does not re­flect my opin­ions of what your records are worth.

This book is one man’s at­tempt to cat­alog the per­ti­nent in­for­ma­tion that is floating about. This book is in­tended solely to as­sist the gen­eral col­lector and dealer in de­vel­oping a re­li­able overview of the market and as­cer­tain where his or her in­ter­ests lie.”

Aside from my bab­bling about the lack of black artists, Elvis, and the Bea­tles in the book, I did pro­vide a brief his­tory of the grading of 45s. The also book in­cluded two guest ar­ti­cles: “What Is An Ac­etate And Why Do They Cost So Much?” by Christo­pher Chatman and “How To Re­al­is­ti­cally Sell Your Records” by Perry Cox.

About Elvis and the Bea­tles: the discogra­phies in the book were huge, but not com­plete. It is too much and so I cov­ered the im­por­tant records and rec­om­mended two other price guides that spe­cial­ized on those two artists, my own A Touch Of Gold – The Elvis Presley Record & Mem­o­ra­bilia Price Guide, and The Bea­tles Price Guide For Amer­ican Records by Perry Cox.

 

NU GM 45 2 800

Like my pre­vious Gold­mine book, I had no say in the title: I would have gone with some­thing like Gold­mine’s Price Guide to Rock & Roll 45s. Nor did I have a say in the cover art on most of my books, most of which I loathed. This second edi­tion was the most tasteful of the 45 books.

Where’s all the black music?

During the heyday of Top 40 radio in the 1950s and ’60s, hun­dreds of records were is­sued every week, all com­peting for the pre­cious little time avail­able within a 24-hour day. There were far (FAR!) too many rock & roll records for this book, so I had to make some de­ci­sions on what to ex­clude as well as what to include.

Be­cause of one de­ci­sion, I ended up with an all-white book. . As for the ap­parent racial dis­crim­i­na­tion, I wrote:

“For the sake of defining the scope of this book, I have dif­fer­en­ti­ated white rock & roll from black rhythm & blues and soul music. The al­most com­plete lack of black artists is not meant as a state­ment in any manner; it is simply a means of defining my bound­aries and working within them.”

I apol­o­gized if this ap­peared racist, but I had a couple of all-black books planned for the fu­ture. (I planned one book for black rhythm & blues and rock & roll from 1952-1962, and an­other for ’60s and ’70s soul.)

This book also sold well be­yond the hopes of Krause and the fu­ture looked good for me and KP.

 

NU GM 45 3 800

Yeah—I didn’t care for this cover at all.

About my other books

There are eight ar­ti­cles on this site ex­plaining the var­ious books I pub­lished for record col­lec­tors. They are best read in the fol­lowing order, which is roughly chronological:

1.  O’Sullivan Woodside’s Rock & Roll Record Al­bums Price Guide
2.  O’Sullivan Woodside’s Elvis Presley Record Price Guide
3.  Goldmine’s Price Guide to Col­lectible Record Al­bums (1st edition)
4.  Goldmine’s Price Guide to Col­lectible Record Al­bums (5th edition)
5.  Goldmine’s Rock’n Roll 45RPM Record Price Guide
6.  Goldmine’s Price Guide to Col­lectible Jazz Albums
7.  A Touch Of Gold – Elvis Record & Mem­o­ra­bilia Price Guide
8.  Blues and R&B 45s of the ’50s Price Guide