Ah, Christmas. A season, generally speaking, of good will, good cheer, festive indoor trees, traditional carols, colorful strings of lights, gift giving and gift receiving. And with the advent of the compact disc, the recording industry's equivalent of the coffee-table book: boxed sets.

These packages of two, three, four - sometimes up to 10 - CDs or cassettes are actually released throughout the year. But at about the time autumn begins to turn and snow threatens to fly, the boxed sets begin to tumble onto store shelves like big fat leaves.The phenomenon gained momentum a few years ago when collections began summarizing careers of heroes like Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin. Even an anthology featuring the seminal songs of long-gone blues icon Robert Johnson sold in stunning quantities. Record labels sensed a gold mine, and a few have created special divisions (Legacy, from the folks at Columbia and Epic, is a prolific example) to scour the archives, remaster the tapes for the CD format and maybe find a few rarities or oddities to spice the program.

The champion promulgators of the quality CD box, however, are the compilation experts at Rhino Records. They're always looking, as John Hagelston, senior manager/press and editorial, put it, for "box-worthy artists."

Los Angeles-based Rhino could be called a facilitator: The company is relatively young (sweet 16, as they'll tell you) but loves the oldies, so reaches agreements with various labels to package songs spanning an artist's career.

"Just looking over what we've released in the past year, we certainly look for those who have a good backlog (of songs) over several labels," Hagelston notes. "You really do have to have some depth to justify the additional CDs. We're looking for artists in any genre that have a solid fan base."

The Everly Brothers' "Heartaches & Harmonies" is a good example, stretching as it does between 1957 and 1990.

Rhino is a player in the mail-order game, and customers' requests can sway the decisionmakers. People kept asking about a Monkees box, for instance, and Rhino went to bat for them. "The fans were happy to see that one," Hagelston said.

The label's big push this year, however, was in anthologies summarizing a key genre. Examples include "The R&B Box," "The Doo Wop Box" and another focusing on the influential output of an independent label, "The Sun Records Collection."

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"These are boxes pretty much pitched to a collectors' audience," Hagelston said, especially those interested in the roots of rock.

In a similar vein, Rhino has another multidecade project coming down the pike: a comedy box, covering a half-century of gags and goofiness from America's funniest and most influential jokesters. The label is also working on retrospectives highlighting John Coltrane, the jazz great, and writer William Burroughs.

Will the tide ever be stemmed? Well, when you consider we have greatest hits collections but have yet to see multidisc sets starring such notables as Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Deep Purple. . . .

"When you get into the '70s, there's all kinds of box-worthy artists," Hagelston said.

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