Thank you for bringing this back to the top, Helen! Such a pleasure to read stories from Don Firth and remarks from long-gone mudcatters - I'll trace this to come back and read the entire thing later.

A dozen years ago when I was first getting started selling on eBay I would find things at garage sales to list. I scored a huge purchase at a church sale held in my neighborhood; a 30-gallon plastic storage bin filled with CDs and a handwritten note on top stating "All classical music." I looked at it and considered digging through when the woman running it approached. "I'll never sell that. $20 and it's yours." I didn't have the change, so I paid for what I had and raced off to a nearby convenience store to get cash. I told her I'd buy it just as someone else was approaching the bin, and it took two of us to carry it to my truck.

At home I stacked all 300+ disc cases on my dining room table and proceeded to sort them more or less alphabetically and realized I was probably looking at a teaching tool, left as the remainder of someone's estate; in the mix were multiple versions of several major works that could have been compared in class (i.e., Bernstein versus Toscanini versus Solti versus Von Karajan on Beethoven's fifth symphony). I had a university class that did that and it was remarkable to hear the differences.

By the time my ex came in with the kids they looked at this huge haul on the table and he remarked "it's eBay time!" and I told them no way - this was a windfall for me. These were DGG, Telarch, Columbia, Nonesuch, Angel, Sony Classical, London, EMI. . . the approach was classical and where choral works were involved, secular pieces. I calculated that at market prices of $10 to $15 each I had about $3000 worth of music, and I kept it. He and the kids looked through the stacks and each claimed things they wanted to own or to copy for themselves, and there were duplicates of things I already owned that they happily kept. (I managed to raise teenagers who liked Gilbert and Sullivan operettas!)

In this day and age of streaming music, when my local classical station plays only one movement of a symphony and moves on to a portion of something else, I still tend to listen to the CDs, loading five at a time in the changer according to mood. Sometimes playing works straight through, or if it is short selections on each disk, scrambling them.

I have remarked to the kids that perhaps that late scholar is resting more easily in his or her urn on the mantle, knowing that the collection is appreciated.