It was two years ago that Andy Phillips stumbled upon what he dubs the “white whale” for vinyl collectors, a storage unit chock full of tens of thousands of records. Phillips had put up an ad on Craigslist as he was building up stock for his online record store (and formerly a blog under the same name), Wax Atlas.

A man responded to the ad, saying his father, who had owned a storage facility, passed away, and he was looking to offload a 15-by-20-foot unit full of vinyl, VHS tapes and other media.

“The urban legend that we all talk about, like, Oh, there’s a storage locker somewhere that’s filled with thousands of records that have been there forever… that’s what this was,” Phillips said.

It took months for Phillips, a longtime music blogger and collector, to sort through them all, but once he’d finished, he saw a unique opportunity for his business in selling bulk sets of used records. Those product packages—everything from vinyl sets and “starter packs” of electronic dance music, hip-hop, ’70s prog rock opera and other genres, listed online here—have helped to launch and sustain Wax Atlas for the last couple years.

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