RECORD DEAL

In Do Not Sell At Any Price, Amanda Petrusich describes approaching a roomful of 78 rpm records “like a chimpanzee devouring a pile of ripe bananas.” Made of shellac and producing 78 revolutions per minute (modern CDs spin 200-460 times per minute), with grooves so large that the discs can only hold 3 minutes of music per side, these rare records were last seen commercially in the mid-1950s. Petrusich, a music critic for the New York Times and Pitchfork, joins fellow 78 collectors Nathan Salsburg and Chris King, as well as the old-timey Strung Out String Band, under the glass ceiling of Brooklyn’s favorite literary greenhouse to celebrate these nearly-extinct artifacts and the eccentrics who hunt them down. Before 1925, artists sang directly into the horns of gramophones in order to record 78s acoustically. 78s recorded before that year have yet to be discovered, but the evening promises a similar intimacy.

Fri., July 11, 7 p.m., 2014