On the far right of the first shot is my desk, and directly in front of you is the middle of my collection. (I'll explain the organization more in a bit.) The yellow binders across the top are National Lampoons with manga below. Those are supposed to be free-floating shelves, but the amount of weight I've got on them is making them sag a bit precariously. You can see one of the shelves still needs to be shored up a bit.
The daybed is a custom-built piece for housing some of my long boxes. The cushions make for a fairly relaxing area -- I've even napped there more than a few times -- and being pretty much surrounded by books and comics is pretty emotionally cozy as well.
Turning to the right, here's a view of my desk...
That's where I do the bulk of my writing and research. Most of the shelves along the wall are books about comics -- histories, biographies, analyses, how-tos, etc. The shelves against the wall but in front of the desk are mostly comic strip collections, while the shelving under the desk is the tail end of my graphic novels. With the tail end of my long boxes under those.
Here's the view from behind my desk...
The facing bookshelves on the left are the start of my graphic novels. They're all in alphabetical order by title with "A" in the upper left. Once you get to the bottom of those shelves, it picks up again on those two higher shelves in the upper right of this picture. (I think that starts with "F".) Below those are my the start of my pamphlet comics in long boxes, housed in some custom shelving I had built several years ago. Same deal -- they're in alphabetical order by title, with the first issue in each box presented on the outside. (I wrote about how I did that WAY back here.) You can just about make out A1 #1 in the upper left of those shelves. As for the shelving on the far right...
That's something of a nook area. The graphic novels pick up at the very top with "K" and continue to run alphabetically to the floor. The books sitting on top of the bookshelf on the left here are oversized books that are too tall to fit on the shelves where they'd normally fall.
Here you can see those same units from the other side...
"S" is at the very top, just under the ceiling fan blades and goes down to "U" near the floor. The back side of the other shelves I have separated with some poster board and use those four inches or so of space for some toys and nerd hummels and such. The long boxes under the daybed pick up the alphabetical order from the previous long box unit, beginning with "N."
One more shot from behind my desk...
You can see a little more clearly here that most of these are overfull, with books stacked and front-facing and everything. They're all still in alphabetical order by author, and I can find stuff quickly, but it's a lot more crammed than I'd like. You can also see my microfiche reader here, and the black, shadowy area directly under that are a number of portfolios with the original art I've collected. (Minus the framed pieces you can see hanging on the walls!)
I'd love to have more space, so I could get to everything more comfortably, but I still find it amazing and incredible that I can house my entire collection in one location and I can access any of it very quickly while I'm writing. Whether it's a specific back issue or a biography or an art reference or whatever, I can get to it pretty easily and not lose my thought process while I'm writing. I've had my library up and running for nearly a decade now, and it still tickles me that I was able to set this up. My teenage self would never have thought anything like this was remotely possible!
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