Let's Talk #Shelfies: Boxed Sets

I love staring at rows and rows of books. I like the smell of said books. I love rearranging, organizing, alphabetizing, color-coding, etc. My love of all things related to books led me to a new feature wherein we discuss said appreciation for books and the shelves they sit upon.

Mostly, this post came about because I was cleaning up my shelves and Katie's because we finally combined all of our books into what we've now deemed "The Book Room". Yes, I've finally agreed to share shelf space with my kiddo's book collection, which is soon going to rival my own. =)

At the last big sale we went to at Half Price Books, we picked up boxed sets of the last six or so Lemony Snicket books in order to complete the Series of Unfortunate Events for Katie. She's not quite old enough to read them on her own yet, but we both enjoyed the movie based on the books, so we thought we could read them together. Anyway, now that her collection is complete, I wasn't sure what to do with the boxed sets because we bought used copies of the earlier books in the series for like a buck a piece from HPB. And I am all about uniformity on my shelves...and apparently Katie's.

When I buy a boxed set, it's not because I like them. It's because I've probably read one book in the series already -- bought in paperback most likely -- but decided I liked it enough to read the whole series and boxed sets usually come at a discount...or I had a coupon that I could use for a massive discount on it. This was back when I first got back into reading and bought boxed sets of the Twilight saga, The Hunger Games trilogy, etc., and Borders was still open and had those awesome 40% off coupons monthly.

The point of this post, though, is what you do with your boxed sets. (I know, I know...took me a really roundabout way to get here, but it is what it is.) I rarely buy boxed sets these days because I usually read a series as each book is released. But, when I did buy them, I'd take the books out of the pretty box, chunk it in the trash, and put the books straight on my shelves. I know I'm probably in the minority on this because what's the point of buying the nice, prettily packaged boxed set otherwise, right? But as I said, I like uniformity. Just as I like all of my covers to match and to have all the books in a series in the same format, I like my shelves to match. And a box, no matter how pretty or special, sticks out like a sore thumb to me.

So, despite the fact that my husband thought the Lemony Snicket boxed sets looked fine on the shelf as they were, I took those books out and threw the boxes away. For one thing, her shelves are just the right size for all thirteen books without the boxes. But also, there's that whole "sameness" factor. It just looks better to me:

What's your stance on boxed sets? Uniformity or let it be? ;0)

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Labels: boxed sets, discussion, lets talk shelfies