As an addenum to yesterday’s post about the comic book magazine format, I’ve often struggled with what the best way to store the damn things is. Conventional wisdom is that you bag and board them and put them in boxes, alphabetically by title. But then you just have a bunch of boxes sitting around that invariably get stacked up or get stuff stacked on them, making it very hard to go back through them and discouraging you from filing new stuff away, leading to the common occurance of having two months’ worth of books just sitting around somewhere.
Today the solution occured to me: 3-ring binders. Punch holes in the issues, yank out the staples, and take a paper-cutter to the spines. In a 2” notebook you could probably get 25 issues of a comic, and then just stick the binders on a shelf with all your other trades. Voilà!
(Needless to say, I’m not one who concerns himself with the “worth” of comics. We’re not talking about rare stamps with misprints on them here. The #1 you think is “going to be worth something some day” was printed at least 200,000 times. You might be able to make some cash speculating on comics, but why not just buy stocks with that money, or learn to play poker instead? Regardless, I do still bag and board all my books, but that’s because the flimsy paper makes them fragile enough that you have to preserve them if you ever want to read them again, not because I’m protecting my “investment”.)