F.B. "Wig" Wiggins likes early Frank Sinatra, has perhaps 20 Perry Como CDs and even thinks Rudy Vallee is okay.

Still, it's hard to be completely convinced when Wiggins says he's "not just a Bing Crosby man" as he sits amid stacks of several hundred Crosby recordings splayed throughout his Arlington home. As he points to a couple of John Wayne and Buck Jones Westerns he owns, there is no playing down the 30 Crosby videos on his shelves, from "The Big Broadcast" to "Waikiki Wedding."

But he's more than a fan. He's the American representative of the International Crosby Circle, which is not, as one member jokes of the name, anything terribly subversive or conspiratorial.

Wiggins, however, is engaged in some uncommon tasks. The 70-year-old retired Foreign Service economist works on behalf of the Circle, the largest of the crooner's fan clubs, to persuade Universal Music Group to unvault some of Crosby's estimated 2,000 recordings.

The release Tuesday of "Bing Crosby: My Favorite Broadway Songs" marks Wiggins's fifth successful effort in as many years to put new collections of the buh-buh-boo balladeer, who died in 1977, back in music stores.

"I feel quite strongly that of all the major popular-music performers from the '30s, '40s and '50s that Bing has received less attention in the compact disc era, and he was sort of fading away except at Christmastime," said Wiggins, referring to Crosby's single of "White Christmas," which has sold more than 30 million copies.

Since he became the Circle's American representative in 1991, its North American membership has increased to 350 from 55. Founded in England in 1950, the group's mission is to celebrate the music, not the man.

Wiggins's ability to build up the club dovetails with his lobbying of Universal. His relationship with the company's music division, which owns the Decca catalogue that includes everything Crosby made from 1934 to '57, is highly unusual.

"It's rare for a collector to be so highly regarded by a major record company," said Rob Bamberger, 47, a Circle member and longtime host of "Hot Jazz Saturday Night" on WAMU-FM in Washington. "Generally, collectors are regarded as nuisances who want you to issue things in the vault that will interest just a handful of people."

Andy McKaie, a Universal vice president whose reissue department will release a regularly priced Crosby Christmas collection in October, said many fans are antagonistic and demanding about putting out everything Universal has by Crosby. But that's not the case with Wiggins.

"He had his feet on the ground," McKaie said. "He didn't think we were trying to hide things from him. He understood the nature of the business a little better in terms of what we try to do."

Asked by McKaie, Wiggins compiled the written guide for a two-CD set of Crosby's complete Decca recordings of Christmas songs last year. He also wrote liner notes or compiled songs for Crosby's work with the Andrews Sisters and his million-selling singles, the so-called Gold Records.

Bob Zipkin, a vice president of sales who handles Universal's low-priced CD collection, said he knew of the perennial popularity of the song "White Christmas," but never thought of regularly packaging Crosby until he met Wiggins. He has come to respect Crosby a little more since a budget collection of Irish songs from 1998 sold more than 50,000 copies, "an enormous" amount for his division.

All Wiggins asks of the record company is to list his name and the club's name and his address in Arlington.

Wiggins said his attachment to Crosby has some sentimental significance. The first record he ever bought, as a teenager in Albany, Ga., was Crosby's "Don't Fence Me In" and "Pistol Packin' Mama," a 1944 Decca 78 rpm featuring the Andrews Sisters singing trio.

Although Crosby is not especially recognized for his renditions of Broadway tunes, the new Universal package, featuring 10 songs from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, includes a few Crosby songs never heard on CD.

Getting a record company to stretch beyond the predictable reheated Crosby hits is what makes Wiggins so valuable to Crosby fans. "We all have 25 copies of 'White Christmas,' 20 copies of 'Swinging on a Star,' " said Steven Lewis, 45, a Circle member from Kansas City, Mo., who started the Bing Crosby Internet Museum.

Wiggins scans the postings on Lewis's Web site for ideas and to gauge opinions about recordings. In February, the two-year-old museum received 145,000 hits, said Lewis, a college biology professor. In December, there were 293,000, which he attributes to Crosby's association with the holiday season.

But it was through a poll in the Circle's triannual magazine, Bing, that Wiggins helped create a list of possible music genres around which Universal could peg a new collection. Broadway songs were among the top choices.

The new release features songs from "Oklahoma!" ("People Will Say We're in Love"), "South Pacific" ("Some Enchanted Evening") and "Carousel" ("If I Loved You") as well as a few lesser-known musicals of that era ("Song of Norway"). Crosby sings with a deep baritone, backed by string-heavy orchestras and, in one case, a chorus.

Beyond his work with Universal, Wiggins is the sole American distributor for a new British-made series for die-hard Crosby fans that when completed will have every Crosby studio recording ever made. Currently, the (so far) 18-CD set has music to July 1936. Each CD sells a few hundred copies.

"There's no profit," Wiggins said. "It's just a personal thing."

He doesn't like to take too much credit for whatever he's done to promote Crosby. "What has happened in the last six or seven years is encouraging," he said. "Bing does sell now in music stores. You can find him in music stores."

His next project is to get Universal to release more Crosby films. Only about 30 of the Academy Award-winning actor's 60 feature films are commercially available. "I don't know if I can do liner notes (the written guide) with videos, but I'll give it a try," Wiggins said.