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Bob Dylan - Box of Vision Archive

Bob Dylan

Box of Vision Archive

(www.boxofvision.com

Robert Allen Zimmerman turned 70 a couple weeks ago, and I thought to myself: What ever could you possibly buy Bob Dylan for his birthday? Here’s a man with everything, including the skeleton keys in the rain.

A person much harder to buy for than Bob Dylan himself is the Bob Dylan fan. I mean, Bob Dylan is probably a guy who doesn’t need or want much at this point. The Bob Dylan fan, however, is always looking for more and can never be satisfied. And the Bob Dylan fan already owns every album by and almost every piece of arcana relating to the Bard of Hibbing, so what else is there?

This salvo aimed at satiating Dylan fans is the ideal answer to that and a real doozy. It’s sort of like the greatest Dylan box set that ever could be, except for one hitch: It has absolutely no music to it at all. (That’s sort of like some Dylanesque riddle, when you think about it…) It’s an intriguing, if simple, proposition. This Box of Vision Archive ultimately amounts to a giant, gorgeous hymnal blessed to fit and house the entire canon of Dylan. As they did for the entire catalogs of the Beatles and John Lennon solo, the Box of Vision company has created a tremendous package ready to comprehensively store the CD versions covering the entirety of Bob Dylan’s commercially released recordings. In an immaculate, linen-covered box, the Bob Dylan collector adds the CDs to a binder with a spine that apes a row of original Dylan LPs, which are joined by a 220-page book of record-album-scaled reproductions of complete art for every Dylan album from 1962’s self-titled album through 2009’s Christmas in the Heart, accompanied by a separate discography book that includes excerpts from historical reviews and reproductions of rare, original advertisements.

Before you can say, “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar,” I implore you to check out the website to see that this is indeed for real and a must-have for any trainspotting Bob Dylan fanatic. So if you know (or perhaps personally are) the kind of person who likes to put Dylan up on a shelf of his own, you have the perfect gift with this. There are obviously a few disbelievers who are likely to call something like this needless. These are probably the people who don’t think that New Morning is a masterpiece. Is it overkill and overly indulgent? Only someone who hasn’t watched and loved bad bootlegs of Renaldo and Clara over and over again would say something like that.

donny kutzbach

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