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Posting in a Moombeans (ex Fiend Collectors) thread: Mind-blowing information for record collectors (especially Misfits)


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It is time to share this (now that FC is dead).
Last year a book I wrote on the Misfits discography was published. It was a limited run and sold out quickly. That's not the point though.

In the 5 years of research it took to write the book, I made a very important discovery for record collecting.
It is is something called "Matrix Alignment" and it assumes that that stampers don't shift much during a pressing, so the A and B sides are mostly aligned.
It also assumes that black pressings can do 1000-2000 copies before stampers wear out and colored vinyl is about 500 copies.
So one with many variants can use matrix alignments as a predictor for the pressing information.
Keep in mind that a lot of the info bands give on their pressing numbers is bullshit. (I myself run a label and can't remember how many of what color were pressed a year ago).

Now some caveats: stampers are checked and moved around in some pressings. Others presses have reference points for the stampers to be aligned at. So it's possible for a repress to have the same alignment.

Here are the pages from the book:

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Here is a printable template link for 7":

https://docs.google.com/document/d/0B9e-rt-UZaxyRy1SRnVYeUYwMHNJOU5JWnluUVc3REdGVm9n/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=110956706318821180845&resourcekey=0-aJnidMNJjCqGFvt6jE3Hsw&rtpof=true&sd=true

Here is instructions and a 12" template:
https://tiny-url.com/matrix-align

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Just to add some context because I never got a chance to tell VC about the book.

 

The final product was 277 pages, full color, the best info for Misfits information. Misfits Central is entirely wrong and we proved it in the book. We also proved wrong the other discographies.

This book was planned to be a big deal. Record shops around the world wanted to stock it. We had a huge instagram following.

We did a smaller zine like issue in 2016 and it sold out in a few hours. Hundreds of people couldn't get a copy. We sold them for $6, but they started going on eBay for $150. So there was a lot of hype about our book.
I finished writing in 2018. In 2019, we were in the middle of art layouts and Scream With Me got sued.
Scream With Me was actually a huge curveball because our book had the same plan and we had to revise a lot of it so they didn't overlap in content.

After the lawsuit (which the publisher later won), we decided to lay low. Took everything off instagram and quietly completed the book. So what was originally supposed to be a huge journalistic book that would have turned the record collecting world on its head, ended up being something we printed in a small run for people in our Facebook group. Even that sold out in hours. You can probably find copies on eBay for $180 now.

I used to run this discography website called Fiend Collectors. That's we were sold the book, but our server crashed the moment of the sale due to traffic. I had no choice but to delete the site and didn't have a backup. I couldn't afford to keep it up anyway, so I let it go. I went to Discogs, to tell the true discography form our research, but it was too much for some people to take and they got upset and got me banned from making edits/submissions on Discogs. So there is no accurate Misfits discography on the Internet, and no one knows about our matrix alignment information.

And personally, I don't care.  I stopped collecting records after I started making them. I'm fine with 1 copy and don't care about color.  I traded my Misfits collection to a pro audio dealer for gear. Sold the rest and started a studio.

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