One of the biggest and best archive labels around is inviting hardcore collectors to join Project 12.

With an eye on the recent demise of Columbia House, the mail-order music club that offered American subscribers eight records (of varying quality) for a penny for more than four decades, Numero Group has announced its own seasonal music club.

The Chicago-based label’s private subscription club will offer 12 “exceedingly rare or entirely unreleased LPs” a year, plucked from Numero’s specialist sublabels Eccentric Soul, Wayfaring Strangers and Private Mind Garden, to just 1,000 members.

The LPs selected for Project 12 won’t be available in stores and won’t be repressed, the label explains: “We’re not issuing them on CD and the only way you can buy them is by joining the club.”

Once signed up, members can subscribe to one, two, or all three series (at $100 each or $250 for all three) and they’ll receive a record from each series every quarter. The first batch of releases include The Cookhouse 5 by Minneapolis funk group 94 East, the hobo tales of Thorn Oerig as Circuit Rider on 2, and a peerless slice of cosmic American music from Jimmy Carter & the Dallas County Green on Summer Brings The Sunshine. The following nine titles will be announced in the coming weeks.

Head to Numero Group’s website to find out how to sign up, and in the meantime, check out 94 East featuring a young Prince on ‘If You See Me’.