So, I read this fun little piece about box sets by Steve Donoghue in Open Letters Monthly, but rather than reveling in the potential playfulness of box sets and the implied seriousness of box sets, I wondered ‘whither box sets?’

It’s no surprise that of the six boxed sets featured over there, four are of science fiction or fantasy series.

After all, the last boxed set I purchased was of books seven through nine of the the Wheel of Time series.

With the rise of e-books, do they make much sense?

Or perhaps they do.

Boxed sets of music are generally of higher quality musicians (a lot more Miles Davis and Led Zeppelin than Backstreet Boys and Justin Bieber), but what if that is because fans of (say) Sonny Rollins are more likely to feel attached to the physical object of the CD or LP and more likely to desire it.

Similarly, science fiction and fantasy readers tend to be obsessive and completist types. Might’n we be tending that way, too?

But, of course, all that goes back to the issue of books becoming less items of mass consumption than something for rarefied and (generally) older collectors. Like fans of jazz. Jazz hasn’t been truly popular since the sixties (I once read an article that blamed Dave Brubeck’s rarefied style for helping establish jazz as arty and intellectual and laying the seeds for it’s decline as part of the vocabulary of popular music).