shelving videos

[calimac]

So I drove to the music Store That Replaced Tower, and I bought two light-weight wooden DVD/video shelving units, and I schlepped them home, and I fastened them together with these little metal plates called mending braces that I'd gotten at a hardware store, and I put the 6.5-foot-high result up against the wall where it rested nicely, and I loaded it up with our collection. And then I secured it to the wall with a corner bracket and re-loaded it up after, no longer resting nicely against the wall when full, it impolitely fell over and dumped its contents on top of B. who was exercising on the floor at the time. No serious injury, but we were both reminded of the light bookcase that behaved similarly in the Loma Prieta quake.

Together with a smaller unit of similar style, this acquisition means that for the first time since we began seriously to collect videos we have enough space to shelve most of them, instead of leaving most piled up on the floor. (Piling on the floor will resume as soon as we buy some more, as the shelves are full.) Which, also for the first time, makes it worthwhile to decide what order to shelve them in.

Just the job for a cataloger. There's no point in using a book classification system here; little of this is non-fiction. First principle of classification: If you need to invent a sorting order for some objects from scratch, spread them literally or figuratively around the floor and see what piles they naturally clump together in. In this case it seemed to me comfortable to separate the DVDs from the videos, and within the latter to shelve the commercial ones mostly separately from the home-made. Within this, a tripartate division: TV series. Movies. Other (documentaries, music - mostly operas and musical theatre stage productions for us). Within each, mostly alphabetical order.

Of course these are fuzzy sets. Is a miniseries or a Masterpiece Theatre-type production a TV show or a movie? And there are special cases. My collection of Jane Austen dramatizations all go together (and it would be strange to separate the TV from film versions), and it includes the updated versions too: Clueless, Bride and Prejudice, Bridget Jones's Diary. And everything that could remotely be considered a Monty Python film goes with the Flying Circus.

A satisfying sight in the end, and it brings out videos of a number of films I haven't watched in a long time.

Comments

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

So what kind of music store Replaced Tower in your neck of the woods? Here in Southern California, what we got was the egg of a goose.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

This. Better Than Nothing, say I. But Not Much.

In case you didn't see it at the time, here is where I wrote about shelving my CDs.

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

Yikes! I wonder if they fired the guy who accidentally allowed some classical music to be listed on their classical music page!

I did read what you wrote about your shelving system, even if I did not have anything to say about it at the time.

Shortly after I moved to my present apartment in September 2004, a friend (non-fan) assisted me in bolting the uprights to the studs in the wall. Then, caldesilk assisted me further by photographing the shelves with some of the CDs on them, as it was my plan to get more of the very difficult-to-find horizontals and I thought photos might help.

Both of these friends are now deceased, caldesilk just a few weeks later and the other friend just a couple of months ago. I don't plan to ask anybody else to help me with my shelves.