What do suppose comic fans did with their comics before long boxes? In terms of storage. Their thin and floppy nature would make it difficult, at best, to keep them upright on bookshelves. I expect some people used file cabinets, but those would be cumbersome to say the least. From what I've seen in older photographs, the answer, at least among the Big Name Fans, was stacking.
The picture here is of Larry Herndon. He was a Big Name Fan out of Texas who published a number of fanzines throughout the 1960s and early 1970s before opening his own "nostalgia store" which carried comics, pulps, movie posters, and the like. But look past Herndon. Behind him are bookcases filled with stacks of comics. That was how comics were stored by many collectors up into the 1970s.
Doug Sulipa...
Robert Beerbohm...
The Cherokee Bookshop...
An unidentified collector from 1948...
In an era before specialized comics storage materials, the only thing fans had to keep comics relatively flat was basically gravity. So stacking them made the most sense if you had any intention of holding on to your collection for a while. Although even then, as you can tell from some of the pictures, the slightly thicker spin would keep books from laying completely flat, especially the higher your stack became. (Hence the need for bookshelves: to keep many smaller stacks.)
Many of us grew up with long and short boxes as a staple of the hobby, but they're not really all that old, and fans used to have to store their collections very differently because of it.
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