Rocket Bomber - article - Manga Moveable Feast - manga - An Intermission: For want of a book.

So, this weekend, I really needed to find Emma, vol. 8.

For some reason, it wasn’t with the rest of my Emma Collection, and I likely would have just re-purchased it but it seems that volume is in extremely short supply at the moment.

I was sure I had, in fact, bought Emma 8 just as soon as it came out, but that was before the move.

So it’s in a box. Sure. We’ll just dig it out.

Each cardboard sleeve holds ~16 volumes, some of these (the entire top layer, under the Naruto Shadow box) are all anime DVDs anyway, so only 24 or so of these to go through, no problem.

Aside: the cardboard half-boxes that I’m using here are the sleeves that our distributor uses to ship music CDs to the bookstore: they hold 30 regular jewel cases so they are known (not surprisingly) as 30-count sleeves. They’re each a foot long, and just a bit wider than your average manga so they fit volumes of both common trim sizes (and DVDs, natch). They’re great; if you have manga overflow and need to organize it (and who doesn’t) I highly recommend them. For the move into the new apartment, I put each half-box in a plastic grocery bag (so I’d have handles) and carried my entire collection of manga and DVDs up two flights, four linear feet of shelving at a time.

Anyway: wouldn’t take long to find Emma 8, right? Well, that neatly ordered stack in the corner was just the first day of moving… after that…

So, there was a lot of crap that is to say I own many fondly regarded manga volumes and anime DVDs that I just can’t part with. I’d just kind of shoved it into a couple of corners, using the four-tiered stacks as makeshift counters and tables — and that’s just fine.

Until you need a book. This is kind of like the old folk story For want of a nail except in reverse.

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First, get your hands on some salvaged lumber.

I just so happened to have a number of board feet of 2×12s, a lesser length of 2×6s, and not quite enough 2×4s — but a trip to Home Depot sorted that out. I also picked up some 1×4 stock to serve as cantilevered shelving, and made the most of all my leftover Simpson Strong-Tie brackets — these things rock, they’re like adult Tinkertoys or Legos.

(I had leftover brackets and lumber because the bulk of this new shelving unit used to be an 11’ x 5 ‘ x 5’ loft — not that I needed a loft bed in the new place but one does not throw away good building materials)

And then I kind of reverse-designed the thing, with a concept in mind, and of course the strong conviction that the heaviest boards should be at the bottom lest the whole thing topple. I also knew that 2×4s are much stronger when oriented vertically (they tend to bow in the middle if you just lay them flat) so there was going to be about five inches of clearance between ‘shelves’ to allow for both the 2×4 (vert.) and a 1×4 (horz.) topper.

Anyway, I knew the overall height (floor to ceiling – minus a bit for the ventilation register in the corner) and I measured my collection to determine the optimal spacing, and then I just kind of built the thing from the top down.

(I used a couple of blocks cut to length as spacers for each shelf, which you can see in the pic above.)

Repeat a second time for a second set of shelves, and set up in a corner (to take up the least floorspace, and so one can support the other with minimal bracing)

And now it’s just a matter of turning these skeletons into shelving.

The shelves themselves are only 3.5 inches deep (that being the actual width of a nominal 1×4) but the whole unit stands at least a half-inch away from the wall (because of the baseboard) and so while it seems precarious, the thin cantilevered shelves are just fine for your usual 5×8 or 5.5×9 manga trim sizes.

At the base, each unit extends out from the wall about 13” — the base consists of the aforementioned salvaged 2×12’s. It’s open inside for extra storage, and topped with a bullnosed 4’ stair tread. Luckily the boards I bought fit (their just a skosh short, actually, but still are quite stable on the base) as I measured, cut, and built the two units before the trip out to Home Depot (the third that day, I think) to buy the toppers for each base.

Now, with 48 linear feet of brand new shelves, all I had to do was unpack boxes and fill the new monstrosity.

In the pic above, I have my One Piece omnibuses (three-in-ones, whatever Viz wants to call them) laying flat to save a major chunk of real estate for the rest of the series to follow (hopefully in the same 3-in-1 format) — here’s a detail:

And of course the shelf-that-is-also-the-base is a full 12” wide and quite a bit taller; I’d like to claim that I designed it to be the exact height of that Naruto vols 1-27 box set (barely visible on the left) but that’s just a happy coincidence:

(Behind the recycled Dark Crystal Manga standee you can just see the top of the rest of the lumber: already pre-measured and cut to build a third shelving unit.)

And let me remind you: this was all for want of a book. (I found it about half-way into stocking my shelves after building the damn thing, but really, after two days how could I stop, without seeing things through to the end?)

All my Emma manga, including the elusive volume 8, now live three shelves down from the top in the left hand unit (per proper alphabetical order; I am a bookseller) just about smack dab in the middle of the shelf.

I hope I don’t have to go through this kind of thing for every MMF.