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The easiest first-pass metric
As a lot of you know, I am the possessor of a lot of Stuff. Among that Stuff is the most idiotically large comic-book collection of anybody I know, which I've been accumulating since 1977. Not collecting -- just buying, reading, and putting in boxes. I don't know if anyone reading this aside from Kate has actually seen all of it. Yes, you're thinking, "That enormous pile of longboxes in your old basement? I remember that!" No, that's only the stuff after 1991 -- there's another 37 boxes that have been in storage for a dozen or so years. All told, it's somewhere north of 30,000 issues.
Anyway, as of last week I have finally begun the project that I've been putting off for 25 years: merging all of the comics into a single run, then separating them into three piles: Keep, Discard, and Maybe. (Maybe == "think about it again in a later pass") The goal for this pass is 10% Keep, 50% Discard, and 40% Maybe. So far, a couple of boxes in, I'm at least within spitting distance of those targets.
I'm mildly amused that I can get most of the way there by applying the simplest and dumbest of all metrics: do I actually *remember* this story? If I don't remember it at all, then odds are it wasn't good enough to be worth keeping. A truly prodigious fraction of the Marvel and DC of the past 40 years fail that cut, which is why I've dropped DC entirely and am steadily trimming back the Marvels. I mean, sure, some of the comics were just *bad*, and those are easy to discard, but it's depressing to realize how many were such cotton candy that they left no impression whatsoever.
Anyway, the sorting proceeds apace, and next week I should hopefully be able to start the other half of the project, the part that has delayed this so long -- inventorying the whole mess so I can begin to sell the discards. I will, of course, be doing that in Querki: it's a delightful little stress-test of the system. (My usual offhand guide to the maximum size of a Querki Space is 50,000 Things, and I've always been clear that this is in order to be large enough to hold all my comics. It's arbitrary but makes sense to me, the same way the size of a CD was chosen to be large enough to hold Beethoven's 9th.) Then I just have to figure out the most practical way to sell it...
Anyway, as of last week I have finally begun the project that I've been putting off for 25 years: merging all of the comics into a single run, then separating them into three piles: Keep, Discard, and Maybe. (Maybe == "think about it again in a later pass") The goal for this pass is 10% Keep, 50% Discard, and 40% Maybe. So far, a couple of boxes in, I'm at least within spitting distance of those targets.
I'm mildly amused that I can get most of the way there by applying the simplest and dumbest of all metrics: do I actually *remember* this story? If I don't remember it at all, then odds are it wasn't good enough to be worth keeping. A truly prodigious fraction of the Marvel and DC of the past 40 years fail that cut, which is why I've dropped DC entirely and am steadily trimming back the Marvels. I mean, sure, some of the comics were just *bad*, and those are easy to discard, but it's depressing to realize how many were such cotton candy that they left no impression whatsoever.
Anyway, the sorting proceeds apace, and next week I should hopefully be able to start the other half of the project, the part that has delayed this so long -- inventorying the whole mess so I can begin to sell the discards. I will, of course, be doing that in Querki: it's a delightful little stress-test of the system. (My usual offhand guide to the maximum size of a Querki Space is 50,000 Things, and I've always been clear that this is in order to be large enough to hold all my comics. It's arbitrary but makes sense to me, the same way the size of a CD was chosen to be large enough to hold Beethoven's 9th.) Then I just have to figure out the most practical way to sell it...
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But yes: one of the things that is going to make a lot of this easier is that not only are a lot of books available on Comixology (so I have some faith I *could* get them if I needed to), but I've already acquired the legal CD-ROM collections of a lot of the older Marvel series. So there is no reason at all to hold onto hardcopy of anything except absolute favorites there...
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(The Munden's collection came out several years after I scanned it all in, and IIRC wasn't complete.)
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He's always maintained a catalogue, but for initial-estimation purposes (to see if this guy would bother to come look) he also had to assess condition. So as you're surveying what you've got, you might want to give some thought to that too.
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And even my original inventory DB was moderately sophisticated -- it was a real DB, written in Ruby on Rails. It contains most of the *titles* (which is useful, since it provides an authoritative reference list of how I alphabetized things), although I never got to the point of filling in the actual issues.
Which is, of course, why my current Querki project is adding the ability to import MySQL databases into Querki...