Bookshelf #1

When I first started acquiring trade paperback and graphic novels in the mid-nineties, I had organized them by publisher and character (at the time, they were mostly DC books, plus a couple from Mirage Studios and maybe one or two from Dak Horse). As the years went on the organization system changed a bit, and today, which books are on which shelf is determined not just by publisher or character, but also the size of the book, and which city I was living in when I got them (Ashtabula, Columbus or Mentor).

This shelf here, which is actually the top of a three-shelf bookshelf I inherited from a friend when she got a newer, better shelf, is the first one you would encounter if you walked into my current home in Ashtabula. The comics here, those books standing vertically to the left, are all ones I acquired while living in Mentor, and they are where they are mostly because of their size. 

The big one on the far left, Gregory Benton's B+F (Adhouse, 2014) was simply too big to fit on a normally sized bookshelf, as are the handful of books next to it. You can't tell from this image, but some of the books here, like Michael DeForge's Ant Colony (Drawn and Quarterly, 2014) and Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero (Drawn and Quarterly, 2017), Karl Stevens' Failure (Alternative Comics, 2013) and Dean Trippe's Something Terrible (Iron Circus Comics, 2017), are so wide that they wouldn't fit in a normally sized bookshelf either, as the shelf wouldn't be deep enough.

The books in a pile on the far right, laying horizontally, are not comics, but are all prose. They comprise my cryptozoology library, which I had to find room for somewhere, as, like, 99% of my bookshelves are full of comics now.