One of the myriad of rabbit holes that tunneled through Sunstone’s ads led to this place in Salt Lake City.

And, yes, it was every bit as trippy as it looks. As you can see, the Cosmic Aeroplane sold incense, pipes, and used books, specializing in Utah, Mormon, and Western Americana books. Which makes you realize that these pioneers are going on more than one kind of trip. (High on a Mountain Top, indeed.)

Which reminds me:

One day, the advertising execs at Covenant Books were huddled around their cups of Postum trying to figure out how to crack the Sunstone audience and get them to buy … scripture tapes. Who could they bring on to be the face of such a campaign? Someone who would inspire confidence? Someone who had never tried to restrict women’s role in the church. Someone who espoused moderate-to-liberal political views. Someone who had never accused Civil Rights leaders of being communists. One ad exec jumped to his feet in a fit of inspiration, “I know just the person!” he cried.

And thus, Sunstone received this ad.

And after years of being pummeled with tape ads, Sunstone finally got a bit of inspiration of its own.

Hey, what if we sold … tapes!

And, what if we hired people to sell Sunstone subscriptions?

The only thing we didn’t offer was a downline.

The tapes lasted a lot longer than the sales reps, and the tapes widened Sunstone’s reach exponentially—especially back when one could not just hop online. In fact we were still selling symposium tapes until 2004, when we discovered CDs.

But the remains of our cassette tape days are still with us. Just go upstairs at Sunstone and you will find these.

And these.

And these.

And if you actually take one of those tapes out, you will see some amazing names on them. For example, our dear Lavina.

Or our provocative Neil LaBute, with a response from our extraordinary Neal Chandler.

And if you’re lucky, you’ll find an entire collection of our Old Testament series lectures in this quality binding.

You may ask yourself, how did we make all those cassette tapes? With these.

And when we needed to recycle tapes, we used this strange device.

Cassette tapes still orbit Sunstone like a million tiny asteroids.