Yesterday I got an order for a cassette. Someone paid $20 for an old storytelling tape for kids, narrated by one “Odds Bodkin.” Oftentimes, once things go into the churning hopper of The Stacks, their provenance gets lost to time, but this one still had an old library sticker on the tape shell, meaning it came from a bulk buy I did from the local Friends of the Library yeeeeears ago.
The frustration set in when I realized it wasn’t in my neat little drawers, but in the three milk crates full of unsorted overflow tapes that have been lurking in the garage since I bought that pile of gospel music a few months back. I make the drawers out of old quarter boxes my wife brings home from the bank, and I had a pile of those at the ready, but I hadn’t made time to sort the milk crates, tape together more drawers, and shift all the boxed inventory down.
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