Comics Quantities

[jducoeur]

Since cellio inquired, and I got curious, I decided to take stock as I was moving comics over to the new storage unit (mostly but not entirely done).

I have 45 boxes of post-1990 comics in storage, plus 36 boxes of pre-1990 comics in the attic, making a total of 81 longboxes. Figuring an average of around 300 comics per box (a number that I read somewhere, sometime, as the usual average; I don't know if it's accurate), that makes a bit shy of 25 thousand comics. That sounds about right.

That's just standard-sized comics. I also have a dozen or so half-boxes of magazines, which probably adds another thousand or two, but the normal comics make up the bulk of the collection...

Comments

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

And how many bound books of the non-comic variety?

[jducoeur]

Um -- no idea. Really. Pretty much every wall in the house is covered with bookcases, all of them full. (Albeit some with other media than books.) And there are several dozen boxes of books in the attic and storage unit, some of them inventoried properly and some not.

It's presumably a couple thousand, but beyond that I just don't know. (And it is *very* dangerous to aid and abet compulsive inventoryers like us. I will say that "Stored Books.doc", the list of the boxes that we *did* inventory, has about a thousand books listed.) The total number is a good deal smaller than the number of comics, but the comics are in boxes and the books, for the most part, aren't...

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

And comics are much smaller than books. At least your stuff is on shelves! My dad, who could have been clinically diagnosed as a hoarder (it's a variant of obsessive-compulsive disorder), had his books and magazines in stacks all over the house, and narrow paths through them on the floor. His house might have eventually had structural problems, if we hadn't stepped in! Good thing you have a storage unit.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Well, I can't claim that we're as good about keeping stuff *off* the floor as we'd like. But at least we try.

As for structural problems: no kidding. At one point, I was pretty confident that the comics in the attic weighed as much as a small car. Even now, with just the pre-1990 set, I suspect it's a good fraction as much. One of the main motivations for the storage unit is that, whenever I'm in the sewing room (which is right under the "comics room" in the attic), a little part of me worries about being suddenly crushed...

[jducoeur]

Oops. That previous comment was me...

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

suddenly crushed...

Naah, it wouldn't be suddenly. You'd hear major squeaking of the beams as the house decided to shift, over the course of a few days. At least, that's how it worked in our PA house when it shifted, probably due to the weight of our books on one corner.