It's a beautiful, warm, sunny day in Seattle. Since there are only about five of those a year, I'm keeping it brief this week with some comics/graphic novels storage tips.

I could write an entire column on this alone, but basically shortboxes are better because two shortboxes have almost exactly the same capacity as a longbox, but they're lighter, making them easier to both carry and stack on a hand truck. Additionally, shortboxes are safer when you're pulling them down. (One thing to watch out for is when you have a mix of shortboxes and longboxes up on a shelf taller than you. If you try to tug a shortbox down with the amount of force you would use for a longbox, you can go sprawling backwards, especially if you're on a stepstool.)

One argument might be that it's cheaper to buy one longbox than two shortboxes, but in my experience, shortboxes last longer. This is because, when you pull on the handle of a longbox to pull it out of a shelf, the increased quantity — and hence, weight — of the comics causes more resistance. Therefore, it's easier for the part of the longbox surrounding the shelf to break away, dumping comics on your head if it's up high (which won't kill you, but it's unpleasant).

The height and arrangement of bookshelves in bookstores vary, but SOP, at least for shelves around 5' tall, is usually to put the largest books on an open top shelf. I prefer to put large books (between 12" and 24" tall) on the bottom shelf, again for safety reasons (if you jam-pack your shelves, the way I do, on the bottom shelf it's not as big a deal if a couple of graphic novels accidentally fall when you pull your desired book out). In general, for me, it's easier to pull things up then put them up. Anything over 24" (like the Little Nemo book), I lay flat on top of closed shelves.

I just moved last weekend, and man, did this help.

Manga series take up a lot of room on a shelf: fortunately, Diamond has manga/digest-sized boxes available, and those save some space (I imagine any local comics retailer should be able to order them for you). I'm not the kind of person who believes that, if I preserve them properly, my comics will all be worth loads of $$$ someday, but they are much easier to organize and access when they fit snugly in the box. Minicomics storage is always a challenge, especially now with the minicomics-as-art-objects crowd. It's nice to keep them all in one place, but depending on the size of your collection you might have to divvy those up by size too (in the olden days, there were only so many dimensions that a Xeroxed 8 ½" X 11" could be folded into, so that helps). One cartoonist I met suggested CD cases or binders for the smaller ones.

No matter how awesome your collection is, it's useless if you can't find something when you need it.