Constructing a Collection - Introduction

(I originally posted this to my comics blog five years ago. Even at that early point in my education, I knew there was something interesting about collecting and collections. The next installment of this was written in the last few weeks. I think this intro still stands up, so I've left it as is.)

I've not been writing editorially on this blog for a while now, so I thought it was time to get back to it. Almost 10 years ago, I opened up a used book and comic store. It survived from October of 2001 to August of 2002, not quite a year, and was one of the best things I've ever done. I won't pretend that it was perfect. Running a business never is as far as I can tell. But for 11 months I had a comic store. Fantastic.

Anyway, 10 years later, I'm in the process of cataloguing what remains of the inventory of my store. The comics are all I have left from it, having donated or sold just about everything else. And when it came time to decide what to do with them, I just could not part with them. So, a while back, I started going through them, sorting out all the duplicates, cross-referencing with my personal collection, and entering the remaining comics into my database. I'm currently on the letter M, so halfway through, and I realized that it's a pretty great collection. As I go through it, I come across little gems that I had no idea were in there, occasional autographed comics (including a Neil Gaiman autograph, which is really cool!), some rather valuable ones. And some that are worth just about nothing, but are fantastic comics anyway.

It occurred to me that I was pretty lucky, as a comic book fan, to have access to this kind of collection. And as I've been going through it, various things about the accumulation of such a collection have been presenting themselves. Because although the vast majority of the collection came from my store, it's also partially come from 25 years of collecting comics. And you learn one or two things in that time. Over the next couple of months I'll be writing short pieces on these one or two things, both as a chronicle of my own collection, and as my suggestions for creating a collection.