It's been a long time since I listened to my albums on iTunes.
I want to play all the songs on an album, one after the other, but I can't figure out how to do it (and there are no obvious candidates in the toolbar). What happens when I play any given song in any given album is that when it finishes, iTunes immediately skips to the last entry in my entire collection.
What's going on and how do I deal with it?

I don't know that it matters, but which version of iTunes are you running? (Edit: v 12.5.4 was released on 12-12.)

Just east of the iTunes window that displays your song's name you should see a little 1-2-3 icon. If you click on it while your first song is playing, what do you see? (Based on what I see, you should see the rest of your album.)

iTunes 10.7

I'm viewing my holdings by "Album by Artist". I see all my albums listed with each and every song. There's no such 1-2-3 icon anywhere on the screen.

I select the first song on the album and it plays, then it flips to the end of my album list and plays that.

To the left of every song is a box. If I check every song in the album, it plays them sequentially.
So that may be the solution (and the equivalent of your 1-2-3 icon).

Now I have to go through the entire list and check each and every song in each and every album. (There's no obvious way of doing that in one fell swoop.) Feh.

I didn't realize that your version of iTunes was that old; it predates the 1-2-3 icon/playlist.

Why aren't you at least up to iTunes 11.4 for OS X 10.6? (You may even be able to run a later version, but iTunes specs have been inconclusive lately, so go by whatever the App Store tells you.)

Before getting involved in the abnormal behavior you're experiencing, I suggest that you update and see what happens..

OK, yeah, those boxes must be checked for songs to be played; having them unchecked tells iTunes to skip them.

(It has nothing to do with the 1-2-3 icon, which is basically a playlist.)

I dunno; all of my songs are checked, and I can't imagine having gone through all 600 of them and checked each box.

In Prefs > General, do you see "Show: List view checkboxes"? If so, see what happens if you toggle it.

I've got .dmg files for iTunes 11 and iTunes 12, but I've never bothered to install them, fearing a complete buggering up of everything I've got stored. And as long as iTunes 10 plays what I've got, I'm not willing to take the risk.
But thanks for pointing all that out.

If I uncheck it, all the boxes disappear. When I recheck it, they all reappear, with those previously checked reappearing as such. So that really does nothing.

But the issue is apparently resolved. I went through and checked everything.

I was hoping they'd all reappear checked.

There must have been a way to get them all checked with one action at some point, but I can't find it now.

My best guess is that clicking on the checkmark at the top of the column while all songs are selected would be the mechanism, but when I try it now, it toggles the column to the right ("Name", in my case).

Give that idea a try.

I tried that right off the top and got the same results as you. But as noted in my previous post (edited), it's now moot, since I went through and checked everything.
Thanks again.

Was "But the issue is apparently resolved. I went through and checked everything" an edit, or did I just plain miss it?

Yes it was; I just didn't mark it as such (since I did it before you replied — or so I thought). So, no, you didn't have a TIA or similar.

Whew!!!

OK, we crossed in the mail.

(So much for unmarked edits, particularly in the midst of an exchange.)

Right on! A particularly risky practice under such circumstances. I'll reform my errant ways ... at least in this regard.

EDIT: All of that was in aid of my needing to listen to Leonard Cohen's oeuvre (over just shy of 5 decades), which I'm still enjoying with perhaps something more than a little nostalgia: I ache in the places where I used to play ....

My comment was meant for both of us, although I'm pretty much never as much at risk as you were in this instance.

Edit: Lately, I ache in places where I didn't even know I had places.