Penguin Workship has announced the Happiness Is a Four-Book Classic Box Set, an October release which will contain their reprints of I Need All the Friends I Can Get, Happiness Is a Warm Puppy, Security Is a Thumb and a Blanket, and Love Is Walking Hand in Hand, all for the same list price as those four $9.99 books combined. But the set also comes with four “collectible cards”. Now, the word “collectible” is something that one can lay on products that, if anything, makes them less collectible. The truly rare things in the long term are items that are viewed as disposable, rather than keeping them for the sake of keeping them. And unlike, say, typical trading cards, there is not some effort needed to fill in a set; either you get all four cards that come with this product, or you don’t. There aren’t some additional cards out there, or some other product that only gives you a subset of the cards.

But what might be more valuable is the box part of the box set. Did you know there’s a box shortage at the moment? The supply chain issues you’ve been hearing about have reduced the supply of boxes, and the increase in people relying on Amazon and other shipping-based services during the pandemic has increased the demand for them. I know products whose release has been pushed back for months simply due to the lack of boxes to ship them in.

Now, I doubt that slipcase that makes this a box set will be the rare item that will be worth investing in but who knows? Perhaps in some post-apocalyptic future, that box will be the one survival tool that will allow you to become emperor of the land!

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