Driftless Books and Music

Driftless Books & Music in Viroqua is a bookstore and community space where records, tapes, CDs, 78s, books, produce, handmade goods, and barter all sit inside the same broader idea: keeping culture in circulation. Owner Eddy Nix describes the vinyl side as both part of the bookstore's texture and part of a wider local music ecosystem that includes Bad Axe Music downtown.

Interview with Driftless Books & Music

Driftless is a bookstore that takes records, produce, and handmade goods in barter — how did music become part of a book and community space?

We've always had albums, CDs, tapes, and 78s around the place — dead media that's coming alive again, same as books. So music was never really separate here. The real spark, though, was Scott Klimick. A few years back Scott moved out from California with a ton of vinyl and a dream of opening a record shop. I rented him the front room of the bookstore for a year to get going. The next year I bought a building downtown, across from the Driftless Café, opened Metaphysical Graffiti in it, and Scott moved into the second storefront with his own shop, Bad Axe Music — which has been a huge success for him. So now there are really two things running side by side: Scott's proper record shop downtown, and the records I keep woven all through the bookstore itself.

You give every visiting child a free book; what's the thinking behind running the store as a community hub rather than just retail?

A bookstore in a town this size can't just be a cash register — it's one of the few places somebody can walk in with no money and no agenda and still feel like they belong. The free book for every kid is the cheapest, highest-return thing we do. Hand a seven-year-old a book that's theirs to keep and you've maybe made a reader, a return customer, and a decent human all at once. Retail's the mechanism; the point is the room and the people in it.

How does the vinyl side of Driftless work day to day — is it a section people seek out, or something they discover while browsing books?

Two different experiences under one roof. If you know exactly what you're after, Scott's Bad Axe Music is a real record shop and you go dig. On my side, records are scattered through the store the way the books are — you discover them. There's choice rock and country out in the front hall, the sci-fi room doubles as the main media room with endless boxes of three-dollar records, tapes, CDs, and 78s, and the poetry room upstairs is lined with classical albums. So in the bookstore you tend to fall into a box of records while you're browsing for something else entirely.

Viroqua is a small Driftless-region town; who comes through for records — locals, people passing through the area, collectors driving out?

All three, and it depends on the day. Locals are the backbone. Viroqua pulls a steady stream of people passing through the Driftless. And collectors will make the drive — especially the 78 hunters. I've got two or three pallets of 78s down in the basement I just let collectors dig through, and word gets around about that kind of thing.

When people donate records along with books, how do you decide what goes on the shelf?

Condition and playability first — something that skips or lived on a garage floor isn't doing anyone a favor. After that it's about where it lands: the common stuff goes in the three-dollar media boxes, nicer classical goes up on the poetry-room shelves, choice rock and country up front, and 78s down to the basement for the collectors. Some of the good classical up there is really nice — the kind of thing that may take me years to properly get around to.

When someone brings in a record collection to sell or donate, what's the most valuable thing you've come across in a box?

The best one that's come through the door was a set of Freddie Slack boogie-woogie 78s — boogie-woogie on the format it was practically born on. That's the kind of donation that makes you stop what you're doing and just stand there with it for a minute. But the value isn't really the point for me. Saving the artifacts is the mission — these things are the physical memory of a whole culture, and if we don't keep them in circulation they just disappear. Books came back. Vinyl came back. So we hang onto all of it. The day some kid decides to start collecting sets of old opera 78s, we'll be ready for them.

Roughly what does a common used LP sell for versus something you'd get excited about?

A common used LP is a few bucks — the three-dollar boxes are exactly that, easy to flip through and easy to take home. The stuff that gets us excited is rarer: we sold an $80 Sex Pistols record just the other day. Clean originals, the right punk or jazz or soul, something with real demand behind it — that's the fun end.

Do you take 45s and 78s at all, or is it mostly LPs and books?

Oh, we're deep in 78s — two or three pallets in the basement alone, plus they turn up in the media-room boxes. So it's not just LPs by a long shot. 45s too. The 78s are their own world — heavy shellac, a narrower but serious audience — which is exactly why the collectors love that basement.

If someone's clearing out a collection, should they clean the records first or leave them alone — and what most hurts a record's value?

Leave them alone. The single biggest mistake is "helpfully" wiping a dusty record dry with a shirt or a paper towel — that grinds grit right into the grooves and adds scratches that weren't there before. Don't stack them bare, keep them out of sun and heat (a warp is forever), and watch for moisture and mold. Ring wear, deep scratches, water damage, and warping are what really pull value down. If it's dirty, better to leave it for a proper cleaning than to improvise.

What do people most often get wrong about what their old records are worth?

That old automatically means valuable. It usually doesn't. The records that sold millions — the big classic-rock staples, the easy-listening stuff, the Reader's Digest boxed sets — are common precisely because everybody owned them, and being fifty years old doesn't change that. Condition matters more than age, and scarcity only counts if somebody actually wants the thing.

Last updated: 2026-07-30