The Beatles in a Box

Thanks to the arrival of Christmas and some not-so-subtle hinting on my part over the last three months, I’ve been visited by the Beatles. Or, should I say, I’ve been revisiting the Beatles.

The Beatles Stereo Box Set (the big black box) was under my tree on the twenty-fifth, and I couldn’t have been more excited. As any of you who read my previous post on the Beatles will know, I’m a huge fan, and to own the entire album catalog plus the singles in remastered digital format is pretty much the motherlode.

I’m still kvelling.

I’m taking my time with this one. I’ve listened to the first three albums so far, and I’ve been just sitting back and taking them in, not doing anything else at the same time (which is a challenge, as I’ve been listening to them on my computer). I don’t want to gulp it all down at once, and I don’t want them to just act as background music. I want to delve deeply into the experience.

Between listenings, I’ve been doing a different type of delving: scouring the internet for information about the recordings and the remastering process. I’ve owned a lot of books about the Beatles over the years, and the individual remastered CDs themselves have booklets containing original liner notes plus historical notes and recording notes, but I still want more data! When it comes to the Beatles, there’s no such thing as too much information.

But more on that later. First off, the packaging!

The box set is absolutely gorgeous. The shiny black box is protected by a shiny black boxboard slipcover. Both bear the Beatles logo above a green apple. A thin white rectangle runs around the outside of the cover, set in about half an inch from the edge. The back of the slipcover bears a description of what’s inside the box, while the back of the box itself is nearly identical to the front cover, except that apple below the logo is now cut in half with its cut side towards us. The box is kept closed by that ingenious “magnet under paper” gizmo that’s become so popular of late.

The inside of the box is divided into two CD-sized compartments separated by a black cardboard divider. The top compartment holds the first eight albums—Please Please Me through Sergeant Pepper—and the bottom compartment holds the remaining albums—Magical Mystery Tour through Let it Be—plus the Past Masters CDs and the DVD of mini-documentaries.

A cloth ribbon is attached to the bottom of each compartment, and when the CDs are all stacked neatly inside, the ribbon runs along underneath them and up and out the righthand side. Pulling the ribbon up lifts the CDs out of the compartment for easy removal. Just remember to keep the end of the ribbon outside the compartment when putting the CDs away.

The CDs themselves all look like miniature versions of the original UK-release albums. The covers are all tri-fold cardboard sleeves with a pocket for the disk itself in the righthand panel and a pocket for the booklet of notes and photos in the lefthand panel. The front cover of each CD is a replica of the original album cover, and the back cover is a faithful redesign of the original album cover’s reverse side. Any liner notes that appeared on the original back cover have been moved into the booklet. The size discrepancy between album and CD covers would make the liner notes unreadable if the back cover had been reproduced exactly.

The exception to this packaging scheme is The Beatles (the White Album), which has a four-panel gatefold sleeve inside a slipcover. The slipcover has the title (The Beatles) embossed, whereas the gatefold sleeve beneath has the title printed in gray lettering. Each panel of the sleeve has a pocket in it, two containing the disks themselves, one (the leftmost) containing the booklet, and the last (the rightmost) containing a mininature replica of the album’s poster, complete with lyrics in a small typeface on the reverse side.

The Past Masters 2-CD set contains all the singles and EP tracks that weren’t released on the UK albums. The packaging is similar to the albums, except that the three-panel gatefold sleeve has a pocket in all three panels, two for the disks and one for the booklet.

Pulling the CDs out of their sleeves reveals yet another nice touch: Replicas of the circular inner labels found on the vinyl LP disks. The labels are larger than the originals and take up the entire top surface of the CD disks, but there’s no doubt what they’re supposed to be. It’s a brilliant addition to an already fantastic packaging design.

One other nice thing about the disks themselves—and this is more about content than packaging—is that each one contains a mini-documentary with pictures, clips, and sound bites related to the making of that album. The disks need to be put into a computer CD drive in order to access these documentaries, but the box set also includes a DVD with all thirteen mini-documentaries on it, so you can watch all the videos at one go if you like. The video quality is better on the DVD too, so that’s another bonus.

So, I’m pretty much in love with the packaging of this set. I think the attention to detail is phenomenal, and with the booklets containing additional historical notes and recording notes, you get a lot of bang for your buck here.

And I haven’t even gotten to the music itself yet.

As I said, I’m taking my time with this collection, savoring it slowly, and I’m going to do the same with blogging about it. Next time around, I’ll talk about the first two albums—Please Please Me and With the Beatles—which were both recorded on two-track equipment and originally mixed for mono. I’ve found a lot of information on the internet about the whole mono vs. stereo issue, and I’ll get into that a little bit too.

Until then, don’t forget to leave the light on.

(Here’s the official promo for the box set, followed by clips from the “Help!”, “Hello, Goodbye”, and “Get Back” videos. The way the first part of the ad is put together is incredibly slick and clever.)