Steve Schwartz wrote:

>That's why I suggested checking out the local library for recordings.
>Others have suggested CM radio.  Granted, a lot of standard rep gets
>played, but I never meant to suggest that standard rep is terrible or
>old-hat or washed-up or uncool.  I *like* standard rep, after all.  On the
>other hand, I didn't always, with certain exceptions.  ...

You may be luckier than most of the readers (at least stateside) on
this list.  My own public library, one of the county's regional libraries
boasts a collection of maybe 50-100 CDs.  They, like the LPs, are randomly
stacked.  I don't think they have tapes.  This is in a community that
probably has as many university degrees as people.  I haven't checked the
county library, which is accessible only by car, and where you can't park.
This is a suburban white collar county.

OK, so this is Northern Virginia, from the old Confederacy, a possible
haven for transplanted rednecks and bible belt types many of whom may
have voted for Ollie North.  (Actually, some of the more active support
for classical music here has come from the Larouche supporters from nearby
Leesburg.) So lets move back in time and over in place to the New York City
of my adolescence.  LPs had not yet been invented.  One public library, and
one alone, had a collection of 78 rpm shellac recordings.  It was on West
53 Street, across from the Museum of Modern Art.  You had to make an
appointment, I believe it was at least one, if not two weeks in advance,
to come in for one hour to listen there to whatever recordings you could
squeeze into your time slot.  One symphony.  Probably not a second.  Maybe
a symphony and a short sonata.  Nothing circulated.

A few years later (1953) I had a summer job in Buffalo, NY, and had rented
a room a few blocks from the Grosvenor library.  There, unlike NY's music
library, it was possible to check out recordings.  I don't know how
accessible it was to people who didn't live nearby like me.

Walter Meyer