NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES Some boxes should never be opened. For the first time, the complete A Series of Unfortunate Events is available in one awful package! We can't keep you from succumbing to this international bestselling phenomenon, but we can hide all thirteen books in a huge, elaborately illustrated, shrink-wrapped box, perfect for filling an empty shelf or deep hole. From The Bad Beginning to The End , this box set, adorned with Brett Helquist art from front to back, is the only choice for people who simply cannot get enough of a bad thing! Some boxes should never be opened. For the first time, the complete A Series of Unfortunate Events – including the highly feared #13: The End – is available in one awful package! We can't keep you from succumbing to this international bestselling phenomenon, but we can hide all thirteen books in a huge, elaborately illustrated, shrink–wrapped box, perfect for filling an empty shelf or deep hole. From The Bad Beginning to The End, this box set, adorned with Brett Helquist art from front to back, is the only choice for people who simply cannot get enough of a bad thing! Ages 10+ Lemony Snicket had an unusual education, which may or may not explain his ability to evade capture. He is the author of the thirteen volumes in A Series of Unfortunate Events, several picture books, including The Dark , and the books collectively titled All the Wrong Questions. Brett Helquist's celebrated art has graced books from the charming Bedtime for Bear , which he also wrote, to the New York Times –bestselling A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket to the glorious picture book adaptation of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol . He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. A Series of Unfortunate Events Box: The Complete Wreck (Books 1-13) By Lemony Snicket HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright © 2006 Lemony Snicket All right reserved. ISBN: 0061119067 A Series of Unfortunate Events #1: The Bad Beginning Chapter One If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despair. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes. Their misfortune began one day at Briny Beach. The three Baudelaire children lived with their parents in an enormous mansion at the heart of a dirty and busy city, and occasionally their parents gave them permission to take a rickety trolley-the word "rickety," you probably know, here means "unsteady" or "likely to collapse"-alone to the seashore, where they would spend the day as a sort of vacation as long as they were home for dinner. This particular morning it was gray and cloudy, which didn't bother the Baudelaire youngsters one bit. When it was hot and sunny, Briny Beach was crowded with tourists and it was impossible to find a good place to lay one's blanket. On gray and cloudy days, the Baudelaires had the beach to themselves to do what they liked. Violet Baudelaire, the eldest, liked to skip rocks. Like most fourteen-year-olds, she was right-handed, so the rocks skipped farther across the murky water when Violet used her right hand than when she used her left. As she skipped rocks, she was looking out at the horizon and thinking about an invention she wanted to build. Anyone who knew Violet well could tell she was thinking hard, because her long hair was tied up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes. Violet had a real knack for inventing and building strange devices, so her brain was often filled with images of pulleys, levers, and gears, and she never wanted to be distracted by something as trivial as her hair. This morning she was thinking about how to construct a device that could retrieve a rock after you had skipped it into the ocean. Klaus Baudelaire, the middle child, and the only boy, liked to examine creatures in tidepools. Klaus was a little older than twelve and wore glasses, which made him look intelligent. He was intelligent. The Baudelaire parents had an enormous library in their mansion, a room filled with thousands of books on nearly every subject. Being only twelve, Klaus of course had not read all of the books in the Baudelaire library, but he had read a great many of them and had retained a lot of the information from his readings. He knew how to tell an alligator from a crocodile. He knew who killed Julius Caesar. And he knew much about the tiny, slimy animals found at Briny Beach, which he was examining now. Sunny Baudelaire, the youngest, liked to bite