I’ve purchased some great new vinyl of late and recently took delivery of some new polypropylene record sleeves. I get asked lots of questions about how I sleeve and house my records, so I figured I’d write an article about re-sleeving your record collection!

There are two main types of record outer sleeves: polyethylene and polypropylene. The polyethylene types often have zip-lock seal at one end, sometimes not, they are soft and look nice when new, but they quickly turn cloudy and they tear easily. This means they can end up looking tatty pretty quickly and they don’t present your vinyl in the best way.

The better sleeves to get are polypropylene or poly-p sleeves. These are much clearer optically, so record covers look amazing through them. They also don’t turn cloudy and are much more robust and less prone to tearing, so they stay looking good and keep your records looking beautiful.

Once you have decided to get some poly-p sleeves, you just need to decide what thickness to buy. I went for 700 of the 2 mil thick sleeves. This is about as thin as you want to go. It means you can store lots of records in a small space though, as the sleeves are not adding to the combined record thickness. The thicker 3 and 5 mil thick sleeves feel great and offer über protection, but they add considerably to the thickness of a 50 record stack, so just bear this in mind. Where space is not an issue, these might be ideal.

Below are a few pics of my records in these great poly-p sleeves. I’ve also shot an image of half of my records in one section of storage in poly-p sleeves (on the right) versus half in old poly-e sleeves. You can see the difference in clarity on the spines of the records and see just how much neater the whole stack looks in the clear poly-p sleeves.

I went with these Cardboard Gold types, from a company called Columbia Sportscard. I ordered these particular sleeves and I am quite happy with them – image below!