owners of out of control collections....

[Cody_Starbuck]

I am lucky in that my collection is still small enough that I can document everything in about a day (about 600 individual books currently). I am maintaining my inventory in a database program called PostgreSQL and I use it from the command line, so most of you would probably not like it.

 

It took me a while to decide what information to document but I ended up going with:

 

Cid (a unique number for each book)

Title

Issue

Price (cover)

Publisher

Box

Notes

 

I added the box column so that I wouldn't have to guess which comic box a book is in. For the titles, I use the name and the year it debuted, such as "Astonishing X-Men (2004)", since some series have restarted multiple times and may do so again in the future.

 

I don't worry about grading since I only collect what I like to read and I don't sell my books.

[Timely]

I had posted a query about databases earlier, but the whole process scares me because I have a job and this could take years...

 

Who here with large collections (more than 10,000 comics let's say) keeps an index? Do you keep them all in order?

 

Just curious where I stand on the disorganization spectrum.

I wish I had kept an index. I have 14 long boxes and every comic is out of order. It's gonna take forevere for me to remember my ABCs to put them back in order.

 

 

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

 

WEST

[Thegoldenage]

Other than my Golden Age I haven't a clue. Started collecting in 76 and have boxes and boxes of silver and bronze.

[NewtSamson]

 

 

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

 

WEST

 

thanks, West.

Now if only I could remember how to count.

[Paladin]

Have over 9,200 and all are catalogued. Put em in order about a couple years ago and it took about 2 weeks, I believe.

[Norrin_Radd]

Paladin,

 

Did you see there was a 9.8 Marvel Premiere #43 up for sale?

 

MP #43 9.8

 

[The Less Blob]

"My goal is to get rid of most post-1980s stuff and get down to a reasonable size silver & bronze collection instead of a complete set of everything."

 

Please, let's not do this all at once. I'm still in the process of cleaning out some of my [#@$%!!!]. I have sold almost all of my image and valiant books off as well as 2099 titles, except for maybe 30-40 I'm keeping (pre-unity, some spawns and Maxxs)

 

Although, for the sake of completencess, I probably wouldn't do this for Spidey, X-Men, Daredevil and a few other titles.

 

I probably would keep a set of Defenders intact if I had it.

 

As for FF --- yep, there's that 4-6 year "unreadable unlookatable" period there before they started getting decent again in the mid/alte 90s. I feel like I should keep those just to keep the run complete, but on the other hand...

 

but do i need captain america? some of those bad hulk issues pre-byrne/mcfarlaine?

 

do i actually care about x-force?

 

so much junk, so little space and time.

[Paladin]

Paladin,

 

Did you see there was a 9.8 Marvel Premiere #43 up for sale?

 

MP #43 9.8

 

 

Cool! I had not seen it. It's very tempting. I actually keep searching for original art from this issue.

 

I did see a page from Daredevil 150 featuring Paladin, but I didn't have the funds at the time to buy, plus it was apparently missing a word baloon. I think there was another board member who placed a few bids on it to. I don't believe the reserve was hit.

[october]

This might sound strange, but I know every comic in my collection, all 2,000 of them. I know which issues I have, which issues I want, and which issues I need to upgrade without having to reference a list or spreadsheet. I even have the numbers of the issues I need memorized....and there are a few hundred of them. I guess it comes from typing the same craap into eBay every other day!

[awe4one]

This might sound strange, but I know every comic in my collection, all 2,000 of them.

 

Hell...2,000 is no problem. It's when you start hitting the 3,500 mark that the collection starts to get hazy...

 

Jim

[october]

This might sound strange, but I know every comic in my collection, all 2,000 of them.

 

Hell...2,000 is no problem. It's when you start hitting the 3,500 mark that the collection starts to get hazy...

 

Jim

 

[The Less Blob]

yes, i knew them all at 2000, that's only 6 long boxes

[tay666]

I have most of mine in a spreadsheet.

My collection is down to about 3500 (was around 5000 at one time)

I've been dumping stuff I have no interest in anymore (just threw another 250 of them on ebay during the listing sale)

 

It's hard to keep up on sometimes, but it has been worth it for me.

 

Now as for the collection itself, that isn't very organized. Things have gotten shuffled around so much there isn't a whole lot of order to where things are. That is one of the reasons the spreadsheet is handy, because is shows which box each comic is in.