I’ll be looking for individual volumes hanging out at the bookstore or library sale. You gotta have the words on paper, man. Keep ‘em in the van for traffic jams. Take one on the airplane. The OED is *it*.
I checked and there’s at least one loose volume on eBay. It would probably take a couple of years to put together a full set, even with an automated search. Is the Compact Edition with the magnifier complete, but just in teeny-weeny letters?
I was doing that for a few years with the Britannica Great Books of the Western World series but then I got lucky and happened across a used bookstore that was moving its location and had EVERYTHING at a deep discount. They had a complete set for I think around $60 and I happily snapped that up. Sadly, the page formatting of the books is an older style where they used two vertical columns per page and a smallish font.....it's pretty hard on the eyes and so I don't read them as much as I would like :-( Many of the represented works are in the public domain and are available free online now though. But I still enjoy reading the original books in bed :-)