Did this LP always skip, or have you only recently acquired it? Pressings did vary. I took a few warped ones back to shops in the '60s.

I used to have a stylus weight gauge in the form of a little plastic balance - you put plastic gram and half-gram weights on the end. I see you can get electronic ones these days. The anti-skating device was a little weight on a string with positions for various down-forces.

I started transferring my LPs to mp3s and CDs over twenty years ago, and finished many years later. I didn't have trouble with undamaged records skipping apart from a few which had always skipped - often bought from secondhand shops and perhaps disposed of because they were faulty. But mine was a high-quality deck. Maybe your tone arm has too much rotational friction. Maybe your cartridge compliance doesn't match the arm - that was a subject much-debated by hifi buffs last century.

Surface noise - pops and crackes - varied from LP to LP. I don't remember any particular label being worse, and I don't remember having any Fontana ones. The weight and flatness of the LPs varied - they got thinner over the years and the thinner ones were often warped - even when new: Island LPs were often like that. But they still played once I got a good deck.

I treated the recordings with a (Linux) utility called Gramofile which removed pops and crackles to some extent. I'm sure there are Windows/Mac equivalents. But these noises don't bother me when I listen to them now; they would sound odd without the scratches and occasional jumps.

Where a record was damaged or extremely noisy I sometimes found mp3s on a filesharing services - I used xMule in those days. That only worked for common/popular records, which most weren't. I would have thought you could get a download of MC's 1st LP that way - after all, you already bought it.