Records of customers’ prescription purchases were thrown away in a trash bin along Eighth Street during renovations to the former Round Corner Pharmacy building, 801 Mass. Tom Wilcox, owner of the former pharmacy, later worked to secure the documents Thursday.

The owner of the former Round Corner Pharmacy was scrambling Thursday night to recover hundreds of detailed customer records that had been thrown away during the building’s renovations.

Tom Wilcox was notified Thursday evening that a desk drawer filled with prescription records from 2007 had been overturned in a roll-off trash container along the sidewalk outside 801 Mass.

The records — bundled into small stacks, each secured with rubber bands — had been sitting atop other trash in the bin, aside a paperback Webster’s Dictionary, an open box of coffee stirrers and a variety of plastic shelves, cardboard boxes and other discarded materials.

Each record included a customer’s name, address, drug and dosage.

Contacted at home and informed that the records were exposed and at least partially visible from the street, Wilcox said he’d be at the site in 10 minutes to recover and secure the paperwork.

Wilcox said that he was required by law to retain pharmacy records for five years and that despite meticulous efforts to remove all sensitive documents from the building — “they went all the way back to 1894” — some records obviously had been missed.

“They’re cleaning out in the basement,” Wilcox said. “There may have been some that we didn’t see.”

Wilcox closed Round Corner in July and sold the building to a partnership led by Doug Compton, president of First Management Inc.

First Management is renovating the building, where a new Fuego restaurant is scheduled to open in February.

Bob Sarna, First Management’s director of commercial and special projects, said that his employees had waited for Wilcox’s people to clear all necessary materials out before starting their own removal operations.

“It was all cleared out, according to protocol,” Sarna said. “They said, ‘We’re all clear; go ahead and take the rest of it.’ “

Philip Kimball, 68, was among the Round Corner customers whose records were tossed away. When contacted Thursday evening, Kimball, a fiction writer, said that he would have preferred that the records remained secure.

Not that it really matters, he said. Kimball said he figures that anyone who really wants to find out his personal information could do so otherwise; just a few weeks ago he’d learned that someone in Boston fraudulently charged $800 on one of his credit cards.

“In general, you don’t like people to know things about you, but I’m not concerned that it’ll hurt anyone,” he said. “It’s pretty hard to blackmail someone for taking amoxicillin.”