PN6700-PN6790: A Comic Book Collection

I look at my books as being sculptures of books. They’re regular books, too, but they’re also sculptures.

Douglas Coupland

It has been a busy five months, and I hope to post a real post in the near future with things I’ve learned, steps I’ve taken, and other important things. But in the meantime, here are a few important links I’ve discovered over the months, mostly through Twitter.

First a few “books” and “book collection” related links:
Continue reading Long Time Gone: Some Quick Links

A quick YouTube tour of the Charles Schulz Library at the Center For Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. This is a bit what I imagine my library to look like in my dream home. Well, my sub-Ellison Wonderland dream home. (Found via The Comics Reporter)

Back soon after a brief career & rest related vacation. Many more thoughts to come.

I hate to start a blog entry with a cliché (an action which itself seems like a cliché, or is the cliché to complain about the cliché… anyway) but sometimes it is important to stop and smell the roses. One of the many driving forces behind this massive exercise in reduction, reappraisal, and redefinition  has been that there was just too… much… stuff… in my life to actually enjoy it all. More than just feeling overwhelmed by personal possessions; more than being terrified by the cumulative monetary investment; more than being worried that I wouldn’t be able to stop buying things. If the whole point in having these books, these things, was because I derived pleasure from them, than I needed to be able to find the time to have that experience. And when you have a pile of unread books, with more on the way, can you really say that you are.

Continue reading When The Pull-List Becomes A Tug-Of-War

One of the reasons to stop buying just everything that catches your eye, to limit purchases to things that really matter and that you can take the time to enjoy, is that when something really special comes along it means that much more. Case in point…

Full Image After Break

Continue reading Happy Halloween

In the words of Jon Bongiovi: “Oh, oh. We’re half way there. Oh, oh. Living on a prayer.” They were wise words in the 1980s and they are just as wise today. I started this blog back in February to track my journey of examination and elimination. Now, four months later this blog has seen some more reflection, some bellybutton gazing, some sharing my home with visitors from Comic Book Resources, and lots and lots of photos of books and bookshelves.

The last month has seen fewer blog entries as I have been working over time on the process of actually getting rid of these belongings that I’ve been examining for so long. I first mentioned the great Weed back in earlky March (see “Weeding Round One“) and even after making the decision to get rid of these items, and pulling all those books and comics, I still had to do something with them. So it has been evenings full of photographing and organizing and grouping and describing and listing on Ebay. At first it was incredibly daunting, but luckily I found a piece of software that made my life a little easier. But now I’ve got new auctions going up five nights a week, with anywhere between 60 and 100 listings up at any given time. It’s taking up a lot of my free time in the immediate, but hope to be through the busy period within the next month and have that much more of my life back.

Continue reading Memorial Day Process Report

Isn’t this what happens to all the best bloggers: you get a little publicity and suddenly, writer’s block. It happened to J.D. Salinger, it happened to Harper Lee, it happened  to Stephen King, and now me: one big success and then, bam!, nothing. Well, my excuse was that over the last two  weeks with most of my free time spent working on the grand culling/eBay project (more on that in a post later this weekend); I honestly don’t think that Harper Lee had an excuse that good.

But I did want to share some amazing book collection links that I’ve gathered over the recent history. Some really good “Shelf Porn” entries, the  bookshelves of the rich and famous, and an example of what I always imagined my own collection to look like in my head.

Continue reading Almost Back: A Library Of Library Links

As my little photo essay was posted today as this week’s entry in Robot 6’s “Show Us Your Shelf Porn” series I assume we will have a few new visitors stopping by after following the link in my entry. Welcome, welcome. Always happy to have a few new eyeballs to share my ramblings and images as I work on examining why and how I collect comic books.

The essay on Robot 6 featured all new photos and thoughts, but you can find more of the same here on the blog. To get an introductory taste you can visit my About page or check out my very first entry for a sort of mission statement. If you’d like to see more photos of my library, especially earlier tours before “the great weeding” check out the shelf porn category.

As for me, as it says various places I am a librarian and graphic designer. I currently work during the day as the Digital Resources Librarian at the Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the evening I do graphic design for TwoMorrows Publishing, mainly laying out Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego eight times a year. And on the weekend, after a long absence, I do a little improv around the north side of Chicago. I’ve been reading and buying comics for far too long.

I try to do a little writing here once a week and share little things between entries. So feel free to look around, check things out, and start any conversations you may want to. Thanks for coming!

Time to toot my own home for a second. This blog and it’s purpose got a bit of a boost today from the blog Robot 6 over at Comic Book Resources. Their regular feature “Show Us Your Shelf Porn” was one of the webspaces which gave me some of the impetus to start up this little blog. Well, this week I got the opportunity to give a little back, and my library is the featured collection.

I’ve been talking to them for a little while now and a week or so ago I sent them a brand new set of photos as well as a brand new tour/essay, focusing on the organization and construction of my shelves and some other issues that I haven’t necessarily had a chance to go into here yet. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to their blog and to share my thoughts, and this site, with the wider community. Thanks to editor Chris Mautner for the chance to share my thoughts and photos with the wider online community.

So go on over and check them out. This link will take you directly to my entry. This link will take you to their main blog page. And this link will take you to other entries in the series.

Continue reading Plug Time: I Showed The Robot My Shelf Porn

More local press on people getting rid of their collections of stuff, this one focusing on selling to make money in the hard times.

Tony Britton always thought of comic books as an investment.

“When I first started collecting as a kid, I thought long term, that maybe I could use them to send my kids to college,” he said. Britton is 32, a native of Hyde Park. He was behind on his car payments; creditors are knocking at his door. Then there is the student loan to pay, the child support. And so Britton is cashing in the remnants of his 20,000-piece comic-book collection.

Needless to say, the theme of the article is “don’t expect to get anything for your stuff you thought was valuable.”

You can read the complete article at the Chicago Tribune website.

I was on “the internet” today and I learned about something today that I always innately understood but didn’t know that someone had put a name to it: Parkinson’s Law. To quote the anonymous scholars of Wikipedia “Parkinson’s Law is the adage first articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson as the first sentence of a humorous essay published in The Economist in 1955” It states “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” The article goes on to provide a variety of corollaries and further adages based on this Law, relating to everything from laws of supply and demand to computer science. One of these encapsulates the concept that had brought me to this page in the first pace: “Data expands to fill the space available for storage.” This is the concept, especially how it can relate to collecting and collectors, that I was trying to put into words. Day’s corollary to Parkinson’s Law: Collections expand to fill the space available to store them in.

Continue reading Day’s Corollary; or, Filling The Space Available

I think this is the start of a regular feature on PN6700: Temptations. No matter how much you want to stop buying, sometimes they make something so beautiful it is hard to say no. At least in this case I have said no so far:

Photo borrowed from the Drawn & Quarterly Blog

No, I am not linking to a picture of a lady (publisher Drawn & Quarterly’s publicity assistant, Claire Bennett). Rather, to my shame, I am sharing a photo of the two fine publications she holds in her hands. One is the preliminary cover for a collection of George Sprott: (1894-1975), the serial by Seth that recently ran in the New York Times (I think? whatever periodical has been serializing Daniel Clowes, Jamie Hernandez, and the other guys). The other is The Collected Doug Wright, a collection of work by the celebrated Canadian cartoonist. For many more pictures of this book visit this entry on their blog. I mean, look at these pages. I don’t know Doug Wright from Adam, but this is a beautifully designed book. Once upon a time I would have pre-ordered that without even thinking twice. But the new me just made a note of it on an Amazon.com wish list and will think about it when it comes out. I do love the size, though. Looking through the rest of the blog (at http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/blog/) D&Q seem to be using it a lot.

Why does the pusherman have to have such sweet, sweet smack?

I missed this now that I no longer read the local free daily “Red Eye” over other riders shoulders on my commute into work each day, but the online comic rumor column Lying In The Gutters linked to it yesterday. From last week, an article entitled “Pack Rat Attack” about people who horde, or collect, items and their attempts to clean-up their lives.  It is a lite piece, meant to be read in a few minutes on the train on a page that is 90% images, but worth passing along for this:

Experts say most pack rats tend to share certain traits. They have a hard time making decisions, they procrastinate a lot and tend to make strong emotional attachments to the things they buy or collect, according to Cassiday. Sometimes, hoarding tendencies are linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Often, pack rats have parents who were the same way.

Emphasis added by me. That entire first paragraph has nothing to do with me (other than the “strong emotional attachments” and a one-time very inacurrate OCD diagnosis), but I thought the second paragraph was worth noting, understanding who makes up a portion of this blog’s readership.

End of line

I decided to put a lot of work into the project this weekend. A cold & rainy Saturday and a  snowy Sunday gave me a good excuse. Saturday I spent organizing that table full of comics from last week. Dividing them up into potential auction lots and putting them all into shortboxes. 13 boxes of comics in all! Sunday I started in on the books and managed to pull around two whole bookshelves worth of graphic novels to sell. Check this out:

I actually pulled a lot more books even after this. Still, it was a bit like losing twenty pounds.

So, after a request in my comments, my father, John Day, was kind enough to take photos of the completed “basement of bookshelves”. You can visit the entire Flickr Photostream at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikoday/sets/72157615600681785/with/3370449266/ But I wanted to share a few prime pieces here. (All comments by John Day).

Three bookshelves of science fiction.

The short-boxes of comics: Post weeding round one.

With a week or two under my belt I went back for another round of weeding of the comic book collection. I made a mini-attempt last weekend and only pulled a few more items for sale. But it ate away at my mind every night and every day. I kept wanting to back and pull more and more and more. I had finally turned that corner and knew that I could cut real, real deep. That this  was to be the major change where I stopped keeping stuff. So after a successful week at a work conference and a day full of freelance work (Alter Ego #85, coming soon to a store near you) I took a couple of hours on Sunday and went back.

For those of you keeping track, the picture to the right is where the comic book collection was at after the first round of pulling. A couple of shortboxes down, but much, much further to go. Want to see how much I turned the corner, here is where I am as of right now:

Weeding Round Two: Half Gone, Baby!!!

Continue reading Weeding: Round Two