The picture below is likely relatively familiar-looking to many:
That's an oldish picture of my collection. The first three rows are now drawer boxes, making access to the early letters of the alphabet so much more convenient. The pity is that my local stores have stopped carrying the boxes, so the latter half of the alphabet still languishes in inaccessibility. The question of how one organizes a collection is very often contingent on how one stores a collection, so I thought it would be interesting to put the microscope to my own storage habits.
The above, of course, is the highest tier of storage. Sort of. I suppose the first thing one needs in order to store a large collection is a large storage space. Before we moved here to Calgary, this particular section of the collection was stored in our garage - in my database comics are still listed as to whether they're stored in the garage or in the basement. I've been fortunate in our current living situation to be able to keep the comics a little more conveniently. These boxes are in a storage room in the basement, and the Active collection is in the basement proper, affectionately referred to as my "man cave."
Though boxes are the most common storage method, they're definitely not the only one. My supervisor at school has all of his Archie comics on bookshelves, bagged, boarded, edge out. I'm not sure which is a more effective storage method. While the shelved comics are easily accessed, one can't see the covers without pulling them off the shelf. With the boxes, there's a little heavy lifting involved (at least until I fix that or get more drawer boxes), but I can more easily see the covers of each issue once the box is open.
One thing that one does need to keep in mind when boxing comics, however, is not to fill the box too tightly, otherwise flipping through the box becomes difficult. I think long boxes are designed to hold 250-300 comics, though I'd recommend only filling them 90%.
Inside the boxes, there's another two options: bagged or unbagged. My snobbishness is going to come through and say that serious collectors would never leave a collection unbagged. If you've ever picked up an old comic, up at a cottage, or from a garage sale, you'll notice the roughness of the interior pages, the fade of the colour. While some of this can be attributed to age and poor materials, some can also be attributed to exposure. Sealed within a bag, there's less chance of a comic deteriorating like this. I've recently come across a couple of Archie comics that must have been stored this way, or at least isolated from their environment, as they're 40 year old comics that feel like they just came off the presses.
With bags, I have four regular sizes that I use often, and a couple of irregular sizes that are required less-often. Comics are divided into three ages, generally: the Gold, the Silver, and the Modern. Occasionally the late 70s and early 80s are the Bronze age, and after that the Dark age. These delineations are in some ways determined by the size and shape of the comic. Golden age comics are about an inch wider than Modern ones, and about a half inch wider than Silver. Thus, one needs different sized boards and bags for each era. Magazine bags and boards are, of course, even larger, though, at least in my case, are used less often. I also have some tabloid-sized bags, for such things as Treasury Editions or oversize comics, and some digest/manga bags, for the smaller pieces. I tend to try to keep Silver Age bags and boards around, as they fit both Silver and Modern age comics, and I get Golden Age comics very seldom.
The last storage-related consideration is the divider cards, and these bridge the storage aspect of the collection and the organization aspect. I've only recently put these cards into my Active collection, and I'm still working my way through the Storage collection. The question these dividers raise is how many comics have to be in the collection for a series to qualify for its own section, rather than being placed in the Miscellaneous section of each letter. I recently re-read my Starriors series, which is only four issues long, but I have such affection for it that I gave it its own area. I'm sure there's comics in the collection that have more than four issues but are still Miscellaneoused.
So that's that. Maybe in another post on organizational stuff, I'll have a look at my graphic novels and magazine, and my other ephemera.
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