But the most enlightening section of the book comes at the back - the Archives Selected Tracks section - which places the contents of the disks into perspective as you look at what, apparently, is actually in the Archives.
Amid the speculation that followed the initial wave of publicity about the forthcoming release, many of us expected the box set would contain almost everything that was out there, a vast collection of studio cuts, live performances, TV appearances, guest spots and everything else that you can imagine. Neil is, after all, one of the more widely-bootlegged artists of the era, and there are existing recordings, from almost every tour, band lineup and era. Predictably, those recordings vary widely in sound quality, so you wouldn't have expected everything to end up getting a guernsey. There're space considerations for a start, and bearing in mind the varying quality of those existing recordings you wouldn't expect everything to make the cut.
Disk 3 does, however, contain a legendary recording from The Riverboat in Toronto, with selections from shows from February 7 to 9, 1969 and presumably what's on offer here is all that survived from the recording process. All of them come from the Master log and presumably any outtakes have long since disappeared.
If that sounds like an unreasonable proposition, I'd point you to Disk 5, which duplicated the previous release Live at Fillmore East, drawn from shows with Crazy Horse on 6/7 March 1970. The book lists a number of recordings of each track with the disk drawn from the JN Remixes (JN being Jack Nitzsche) with the exception of the closing Cowgirl in the Sand (P. Siegel 3/8/70). The Neil solo set from 7 March is missing in action, and the disk avoids duplicating Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Winterlong from the 6 March show, where only those tracks and The Loner/Cashbox Rap seem to have been recorded.
Rolling over to Disk 7, which again duplicates a previous release, Live at Massey Hall is drawn from two solo shows on 19 January 1971 and again avoids repeating tracks. Most of the content is drawn from the late show and only four tracks from the early show seem to have been recorded.
Among the live omissions, there are CSNY tracks from the 1969 Big Sur Folk Festival (Master PA Mix) and the Fillmore East (Sea of Madness makes the cut) in 1969 and Fillmore East and Chicago shows from 1970 (Tell Me Why and Only Love Can Break Your Heart used). Also largely unrepresented are solo shows from the Cellar Door in Washington from late 1970, Royce Hall and Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles in 1971 and the BBC TV In Concert appearance in February that year.
The Archives, in other words, are hardly the comprehensive collection that many fans had been expecting, and at the price (I didn't get much change out of $A250) you could well end up feeling short-changed.
There are, of course, a couple of pluses. Not many, but let's look at it from the glass half full side of things.
For a start, despite all predictions to the contrary, the package has actually appeared, and with the issues about formats and configurations presumably settled, we might see Volumes 2 through to 4 appear at regular intervals over the next couple of years. When they do, it's reasonable to expect they'll be increasingly content-rich. The early years of anyone's career are likely to be the least-thoroughly documented, after all.
Maybe by the time Volume 2 appears Young's preferred format (Blu-Ray) will be sufficiently well established in the marketplace to make it the preferred option for the majority of consumers. By that stage, of course, we might well be looking at a whole new platform, with the usual backwards-compatibility issues.
But if you're looking for positives the biggest is undoubtedly the sound quality. Anyone who bought the remastered Greatest Hits would have a fair idea of what to expect, but the quality, particularly on the earliest recordings, is quite stunning. Far better than you'd think it has any right to be.
Then there are the extras hidden away on the various disks - something you'll presumably miss if you opted for the CD version - though they're not always easy to locate once you get past the pins on the time line side of things.