Welcome to the Pleasure Dome

No, not the album by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. I’m a tad too old for that.

Instead, it’s about this. A 1949 album, “an audible anthology of modern poetry read by its creators”, edited by someone called Lloyd Frankenberg. And the album is a Long Playing Microgroove Record, the first I’ve bought in twenty years.

Amazing stuff. Readings by TS Eliot, Marianne Moore, ee cummings, William Carlos Williams, Ogden Nash, WH Auden, Dylan Thomas, Eliazabeth Bishop.

• Never knew such an album existed.
• Never thought I’d ever hear the voices of some of these giants of my youth.
• Never dreamt I would be able to acquire such a collection.
• Particularly an album with ink autographs of some of the poets.
• And none of this would have been remotely possible except for the web and for trust and for humanity.
• Without collaborative filtering on some other purchase I would not have known of the album’s existence. Period.
• The seller preferred to deal locally, having been burnt by international would-be buyers before. Without my PayPal and eBay credentials, and without my Google visibility (this he only told me about later) he would not have sold it to me.
• Without my innate belief in humanity, and without my trust experience with eBay and PayPal, I would not have paid the pretty penny it took.

But. It’s in my hands. And Barry’s happy; Paypal’s happy; eBay’s happy. And I am happy.

And I am even happier that all 8 poets had Wikipedia entries.