Tonearms without anti-skate, damage to records?

Quality tonearms were produced before antiskating became a feature.
Somewhere in the ?? late 70's it started being used on some arms.
Eventually nearly all arms got it.
It will NOT damage your LPs or your cart to not have it.

VPI recommends NO anti-skate. Anti-scate is a crapshoot, and is NEVER right. It depends on the loudness being tracked (which constantly is changing), shape of stylus, VTA, and numerous other conditions. No antiskate is fine. Use your cartridge at the higher tracking force of the recommended suggested range.

E and S, thanks so much for the guidance! Elizabeth, it is always great to hear from you, but I think that bias adjustments came earler than that; one of my arms is a Micro Seiki MA202L from around 1970 with standard anti-skate. It would be interesting to see when it became common on arms. The new old arm is an ESL (Ortofon) 2000, so I will go for it.

I agree with the above posters who say that not having an antiskating adjustment will not harm your records. I have a couple of test records that test for antiskating, one with a blank side and another that has a test tone track, and Stringreen is correct, it is very difficult to set antiskating so that it does not pull the arm toward the center of the record. I would like to think I can hear sonic differences with different antiskating settings on my Graham Phantom unipivot arm, but I might be fibbing. The only effect I thought I could hear was slight skewing of the soundstage right or left. Personally I would not let this lack affect my decision.