FROM JUNE 2023 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

“I want to hear the whole record. Every song.”

Some might call Paul Chisholm an old-fashioned music fan. Like most of us, Chisholm, who is 57 and lives near King and Bathurst, uses the internet to check out new tunes. But often, YouTube is only a gateway to his main source.

“I go onto the Toronto Public Library’s web page, where the music section has the list of all the music they have. It’s, like, 80 pages of CDs. If I’m bored, I’ll go through it one page at a time, looking at the names of the artists. And I’ll be like, Oh, who’s this? Then I’ll go to YouTube to play a song. If I like it, I’ll get it from the library.”

For Chisholm, the Toronto Public Library’s music catalogue is like a deep treasure chest, a well for discovery. He’s after fresh music, but not just the sounds: simply hearing the music isn’t enough. To really “get it,” he says, you have to hold it. And while buying dozens of new CDs is an expensive proposition, the largest selection in the city is available free to anyone with a public library card.

The Toronto Public Library’s CD collection stands at 156,991 discs, 44,796 of which are unique titles. (The rest are duplicates.) These are spread across the TPL’s branches, but the largest cache is at the Toronto Reference Library.

“It used to be that all of the CDs in the Reference Library were behind the desk,” says Will C., a librarian who oversees the music collection in the arts department. “To listen to anything, you had to provide your card or at least a piece of ID [and listen to it in the building]. But in 2019, it was decided that we would take a chunk of the collection – most of it, actually – and let it circulate.”

Will’s job is both curatorial and operational: He surveys the collection, looking for gaps to fill with new music, and he maintains the collection, cleaning or replacing damaged CDs and staging epic hunts for missing booklets. According to the TPL’s collections department, library users checked out 432,857 CDs in 2022, up by almost 24,000 from the previous year. Paul Chisholm, it seems, is hardly alone in his passion for getting the whole record.

Notably, the Reference Library’s open CD shelves are among the few places left in the city where it’s still possible to browse music aimlessly, to wander and scan the shelves for the pleasure of it.

“The CD collection is organized by accession number” – based on the date of acquisition rather than alphabetically or by genre – “because we never thought we’d be opening it up to the public,” says Will. “So you end up with Metallica right beside Pavarotti, right beside Bob Marley, right beside Sade.”

With their rows of scuffed spines, the open shelves have a whiff of a used record store, as likely to be organized by whim as by title or genre. The kind of browsing this set-up enables is a lost art, according to Jason Guriel, who wrote the book On Browsing, a short elegy for the experience of passing time among records, books and other physical media, published last year by Biblioasis. As a student, says Guriel, in addition to logging hours at HMV and The World’s Biggest Bookstore, he spent plenty of time browsing the university libraries at York and U of T.

“The journalist-editor Leon Wieseltier, when he was talking about Harvard’s library, said something like, ‘The book I needed was always next to the one I was looking for,’” Guriel tells me. “That, to me, is the essence of life: You go and find the thing you weren’t looking for, but it’s the thing you actually need. I just don’t know how you achieve that digitally – the serendipity and the chaos of combing through shelves and bins.”

A quest that leads to reward and renewal is a familiar story in both mythology and music fandom. When certain treasures are brought together, magic happens. Take, for instance, the story of local Etobicoke legend Donny Greco, who spent a summer of his youth on an odyssey to find the heart of country music in the TPL’s vinyl record collection.

“I don’t know if you remember what it was like making a mix tape,” Greco says. “You had to time things perfectly. Do the math. And it was all albums: You had to lift the needle, drop it on, hit record on your taping device. Make sure you got it.”

In 1983, when the library’s vinyl collection still circulated among branches, Greco scoured the bins, seeking out every single country and western LP on offer. He’d listen to every track and, after selecting the best ones – “the almost adagio, dirge-type songs that I love, the really short ones that are sentimental and heartfelt” – he’d spin the records, press record on his tape recorder and make mix tapes, which he distributed among friends and, eventually, fans.

His decision to mine the country collection was driven by curiosity and passion – Greco emphasizes the importance of music in his life – but also what was available at the time.

“Classical and Western were probably the biggest collections in the library,” he says. “They didn’t have a lot of punk rock or jazz.”

These days, the TPL is trying to broaden its vinyl horizons. It takes a bit more precision to access their LP collection than in Greco’s mix tape days; all of the library’s vinyl is tucked away in a corner of the Reference Library’s fifth floor, and it has to be signed out and listened to in the building. But it’s still the largest collection of any public library in Canada. And as demand for vinyl has spiked, Will and his colleagues have begun to diversify it.

“Around 2015 or 2016 was when the library noticed that interest in vinyl had really resurged,” Will tells me. For years, as the medium declined in popularity, the TPL replaced old or damaged vinyl with CDs. Much of this was popular music, whereas what remained of the record collection at the Reference Library skewed heavily academic.

“The collection here had been so thoroughly curated for music research purposes that it reflected very antiquated views of music collecting,” Will says. “Essentially, the only genres that we had on vinyl were classical, opera, jazz, some blues, some folk – Smithsonian Folkways recordings, stuff like that.”

With vinyl’s second life, the library has once again allocated a budget for new LPs, and Will is working to include more contemporary musical styles. He shows me records by Prince, Ministry, Pearl Jam. “I’m trying to get some ’90s stuff in here,” he says. “We’ve been filling gaps in the collection. I’ve noticed we need more hip-hop, more funk, more reggae, more soul, more R&B.” He searches for the catalogue’s copy of Maestro Fresh Wes’s Symphony in Effect – an early hip-hop acquisition, since the library prioritizes Canadian music, but finds it missing.

“I’m going to have to make note of this one,” Will says.

Of course, the collection also boasts rarities that would elevate the deep-cuts mix tape of even the most obsessive music fan. Will shows me a favourite, a 1982 LP called Music for Subways: a collaboration between Foxtrot Records and the TTC that showcases Toronto subway musicians performing their work in studio. Unlikely and distinctly local, it’s exactly the sort of artifact Jason Guriel describes: something you’d never go looking for but might just find out you need to hear.

The resurgence of vinyl is a manifestation of the same desire Paul Chisholm feels, to hold music in your hands. To feel the energy accumulated in an album that might have passed through dozens of hands, and fed dozens of mix tapes like Donny Greco’s. For those who want to experience recorded music in the most tactile and human way, the library abides, tailoring its collection to the times without losing its essence, and offering space for listeners to come and use its listening stations.

Will tells me about one regular who comes in exclusively for the Caribbean music. “All of our reggae and Caribbean CDs – soca, calypso, chutney. He’ll sit there for hours listening to it, bobbing his head and enjoying it. And then he goes home and comes back and does it again.” There are youth coming in to learn how to use record players, and parents introducing their kids to vinyl, listening together to classics that span generations; the original Star Wars soundtrack LP is a popular request. The fifth floor even plays host to the occasional budding romance.

“Sometimes when people come in, you can sort of tell that they’re on a date,” Will says. “They want to listen to some vinyl record together. And it’s just really endearing.”