I liked Peter Bickford's article on managing a large comic collection. I'm always curious what processes other people use for large collections.
Labeling and dividers - I should take advantage of these methods especially the dividers. It would be a major time saver in finding a series instead of a "divide-and-conquer" approach.
Comic boxes - My back will thank me for transitioning to the Drawer style. The cost of changing out some many short boxes is what keeps me from pulling the trigger. I use short boxes since they are much easier on my back and they make storage easier as they can fit in smaller places, but it is a pain to get at comics on the bottom of a stack of boxes. I'll start by buying a few drawer boxes each year (I'll be 120 years old by the time I finish).
Sorting - Originally, I did try sorting by title but when it came to adding new comics, the overflow would ripple down a few hundred boxes. To limit the number of boxes impacted, I started grouping the comics by major publishers then sort by title. The categories are: major publishers, active publishers, and non-active publishers.
Major publishers - the term is subjective and is mainly determined by the number of comics I owned of a particular publisher. e.g. Is there enough to fill a couple short boxes?
'Active' publisher - All other publishers that are still publishing comics and I own a small amount of their titles.
'Inactive' publishers - Any publishers that are no longer publishing comics (Comico, First, Pacific, etc.)
Bagging - I use the standard comic bags sold at my local comic shop. A while back, I bought a couple packages of the Mylar bags. My plan is to slowly transition the more valuable comics in my collection (Dazzler #1 🙂 ) to Mylar. It didn't make sense to replace all the bags due to the cost. I don't know if anyone has thoughts on using the cheaper comic bags vs. Mylar.
It seems to work okay, although at times, I would like to go back to sort-by-title only just because I like keeping the sort simple instead of multiple layers.
-Dennis
