My Personal Library 2.0

Back in 2014, I posted pictures here of the room I set up and designated as my personal comics library. On top of whatever regular comics purchases I've made, I came into the possession of three separate collections of comics since then. I haven't done a precise count, but I'm guessing my collection of pamphlet comics has increased by about 50% and my collection of graphic novels has at least tripled, if not quadrupled. I think my number of manga has tripled as well, but I didn't have that many to begin with, so that part's not very impressive. So when I acquired the most recent collection last year, the question seriously came up: where do I put all these?

Well, my wife and I were discussing re-assessing our room "assignments" as it turns out. We've had one of our spare bedrooms set up as a guest room, but we never have guests over. Additionally, part of our utility closet made way for a 3D printer not long after the pandemic started (due in large part to my concerns about supply chain issues; I can print my own replacement pieces rather than have to wait months for an insignificant-looking-but-still-critical part to ship over from China) and I had been using our home office as an ersatz workshop for assembling and finalizing printed pieces, which she wasn't a fan of. So we ultimately opted to turn the spare bedroom into a second home office for me, where I could store my extra 3D printing supplies and do any workshop-y stuff. This had the added bonus of giving me more room to put in more bookshelves.

I've then had to split my collection between two rooms. All my comic books and graphic novels remain in my 'main' library, and my reference books and comic strip collections have been moved to my... well, I don't really have a name for this room yet. It's kind of a combination second home office/3D printing workspace/second library/cat sanctuary. (It's the only room in the house that the cat can hang out without being able to be pestered by the dog.) While it is a little annoying that I can't keep my entire comics collection in a single room, that my second library doubles as my home office for the day job means there's a computer in each room and it's not overly difficult to switch back and forth since most of my writing is done in the cloud anyway.

In any event, I thought I would share pictures of what my updated comics library looks like. It's the same basic layout as I had set up originally, but it's considerably more packed. Let me do a before/after setup...

2014	2023
My desk/workspace...
The view from my desk...
The day bed...
View from the day bed...

As you can see, it's considerably more crowded and has more of a floor-to-ceiling thing going on. Here are the bookshelves I had to put in the second room...

These are, as I noted above, mostly reference material. The smaller bookshelf on the the left is just comic strip collections; the right-hand bookshelf consists mainly of books about comics (histories, biographies, how-tos, critical analyses, etc.) with the second-to-bottom row all books on fandom, and the very bottom row a 20-ish year run of National Lampoon and a smattering of Mad-related books and magazines. Not visible on the far right is another bookshelf with about 30 years' worth of Heavy Metal dating back to issue #1.

When I built my library originally back in 2014, I had anticipated my collection would grow and I tried to ensure I had as much room as possible to do that. I vastly underestimated how many comics I would pick up over the years, though. And while I tried to build in some amount of extra space here as well, I know I'll run out of space again sooner than I'd like. But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, I suppose.

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