This young woman is obviously distraught and overwhelmed, but it’s not her fault. It’s the fault of her radio-phono dealer, who neglected to sell her anything in which to store her records. She is pictured in the February 1941 issue of Radio Retailing, which reminds dealers of the potential peril, and explains that “people who buy soon have scarred and battered records scattered all over the house unless dealers simultaneously sell accessories to keep them in.”

To prevent this from happening, the magazine listed the manufacturers of a number of different racks and cabinets, any of which would have solved this woman’s problems. The next page of the magazine showed one reason why the problem was becoming acute: It was the prevalence of compact combination radio-phonos hitting the market. The player didn’t take up much space, but the records that it played represented a storage problem.