I snagged a ton of cassettes at Gabriel’s Used Bookstore. I wanted them because they were uniform in their design. They were, in other words, a “collection,” and I love being able to look over a collection.

There were two more smaller bins also filled with cassettes, and while there was junk in there (Windham Hill? OMG. Bemidji Choir? Ok.), the bulk of the collection was “Musical Heritage Society” on cassette.

Wiki tells me that the “Musical Heritage Society was an American mail-order record label founded in New York City in 1962.”

If you are as old as I am, you remember subscription-based CD services — fourteen discs for a penny, and all you needed to do was mortgage your house to keep up with the discs they sent you every month after.

Music Heritage Society was different in that it wasn’t just selling discs commercially available other ways — it licensed performances and manufactured the recordings on its own, on what Reddit users insist is high-quality vinyl, high-quality tape, and-high quality CDs. (It’s fun to see what audiophiles celebrate.)

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As collections go, this one is both cool because of the diversity of material and, some ways, cool for what it tells me about the owner — someone patient enough to tolerate some clangers some months (“A Solid Brass Christmas” would be a clanger for me), but listening with open mind and heart, hopefully.

I say “hopefully” because I also know that I subscribe to some things that can sit on my desk, ready to be read or listened to, for months.