My wife has been trying to get craft room under control; since we moved here six years ago, it has kind of become a dumping ground for unplaceable objects. Recently, she realized one box was in fact full of my stuff, and passed it on to me. Going through, it seemed to be made up of odds and ends that were probably thrown together at the last minute when we were moving. There were papers from my grad school creative writing group, extra cords and webcams, a small shelving unit for books, bumper stickers a friend mailed me from South Carolina, CD copies of the amateur audio dramas I made in high school and college.
Some of it was clearly not worth saving, and at the time I had been in too much of a hurry to make that call, so I tossed it. What I wanted to save, though, was mostly of sentimental value; it didn't have any place to go but back into a closet. My office closet, however, was a mess. Boxes of junk piled on the floor, two nonfunctional VCRs, wrapping paper and gift bags, random boxes of stuff poorly balanced on other stuff. There was no room to put another box in there.
What I have long intended to do is put some HDX wire shelves in there, the ones you can get at Home Depot; a couple years ago I put those in the boys' closet, and they're easy to set up and of flexible heights. The problem with that, though, is that one corner of my closet is entirely taken up by comic longboxes. The closet is not deep enough for them to face out, so they were put in sideways, in two stacks of four. This had been pretty annoying as my comic collection has grown, because if I want to add/remove a comic from a box on the back in the bottom, I have to move seven boxes out of the way to do it!
So I decided to replace all my longboxes with, well shortboxes. These would work with the depth of my closet, and could fit with those HDX shelves. A few days later, a set of boxes came from BCW and I began transferring my comics over.
I have a comic collection that is not small, but always feels small compared to what I know some collectors possess; not counting collected editions, which I shelve like books, I currently have 1,884 comics, which range alphabetically from ABC A-Z: Top Ten & Teams #1 to Young Romance: The New 52 Valentine's Day Special #1, and in publication sequence from Classics Illustrated #124 (Jan. 1955) to Fallen Friend #1 (Sept. 2023). I like them organized alphabetically (of course).
My comics are very oddly distributed across the alphabet:
My complete runs of All-Star Squadron and Alpha Flight (vol. 1), as well as sizeable collections of Action Comics Weekly and Adventures of Superman (vol. 1) lead to a hefty number of A comics; I also have a complete run of Green Arrow (vol. 2) and of course a number of Star Trek and Transformers comics. On the other hand, am I the only comics fan to have no comics beginning with X?
In longboxes, this meant two whole boxes for A and G getting its own box. In the smaller shortboxes, arranging things got trickier, given my inclication to not split letters up across boxes unless absolutely necessary, and never to split series across boxes at all. (Officially, a BCW shortbox holds 150-75 issues.)
I ended up solving the problem by pulling Alpha Flight, Green Arrow, and Star Trek into their own boxes, and then doing the rest alphabetically. I plotted things out with no letters spanning multiple boxes, but when transferring to the new boxes, found that I had to break D across two boxes. (D could fit in one box itself, but that would leave my whopping 11 E/F comics in their own box; once those are in the D box, not all the Ds fit anymore, so I had to move some into a box with C.)
I then moved the boxes onto my newly assembled shelves, back into the closet. All in all, what had once taken up eight longboxes now fits fifteen shortboxes:
It's hard to get a good picture of, because they are tucked in and the door gets in the way, but I think they look pretty good. (To access anything in the right two columns, you need to move a box on the left out of the way, but that's still much more accessible than they were.) I have very limited room for expansion, however! Not sure where I will put my seventeenth shortbox.
My old boxes were just labeled with giant marker letters, but I decided to make somewhat nicer labels this time, which you can see better in these pictures:
On the label this time, I indicated any title that I had more than twelve issues of, the first title in each box, the last title if the same letter appeared in the next box, and the first title following any series moved out of sequence (e.g., Amazing Adventures is the first title alphabetically after Alpha Flight, which belongs in the middle of the second A box). For "titles" I went by what you might call the "least common denominator" going by how the title begins; "Batman" covers Batman, Batman '66 Meets the Legion of Super-Heroes, Batman 80-Page Giant, The Batman Chronicles, Batman: Batgirl, and so on, whereas Magnificent Ms. Marvel is listed separately from Ms. Marvel because they begin with different words. (I know you don't care, but my wife certainly doesn't, and I have to explain it to someone.)
This done, it was easy to assemble a second shelf on the left side of the closet and consolidate or dump the rest of the materials in my closet. I now actually have a whole empty bin, whereas before I would have claimed the closet was crammed to bursting.
The next project: organizing all the junk that my office floor has somehow become a repository for...
(Also if you live in the Tampa area and want some gently used longboxes, I have ten of them.)
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