Hi Paul,
Not having visited the board in a good while, I was pleasantly surprised to come across your message. Let me respond to your comments without further preamble.
1) That bit of information came from a gentleman who wrote to me about various old Peggy Lee CD items. I did query him about his allegation that this cardboard edition existed, and he protested that he had seen it with his very own eyes while in Japan, and that it was the first edition or pressing of the CD. He did not have any “hard evidence” (by which I mean, a copy of the CD in his collection, or a photo of it), though. Hence it would be fair to suspect faulty memory. Querying him again is no longer an option, as he has now passed away, but I think I’m going to delete the entry anyway. As far as I’m concerned, you are the authority in Japanese cardboard CDs, and if you haven’t seen this one, the chances of its actual existence are slim at best.
2) I did see it advertised online, a good while ago. At the time, I also found audio samples that indeed sounded pretty good. My understanding is that this is a Public Domain release (as opposed to a bootleg). The album is now about 55 years old; Japan’s copyright laws period for albums is 50 years. [Paul, if part of the reason why you are mentioning this CD is that the discography doesn’t have it listed, that is true. The discography has been on hiatus for some time now, with nothing new being entered. Among the reasons for the hiatus: I am in the process of migrating the discography to a different server, a long-term task that requires technical learning on my part, as well as the re-configuration of lots of text.]
Ivan