When I was a kid, storing your comics wasn't a big issue. They weren't considered valuable, nor fragile, and so they got left around and wrinkled, etc. But by the time I was ten, I started reading them as a series, a continued story, and suddenly, keeping them in order became important!
I initially kept my comics in two former tide detergent boxes. They were cut diagonally from the upper left corner down at 45 degree angle to about halfway down the box, then straight across the side, and back up the back at 45 degrees. This allowed them to stand upright, and for a bout 1/3 of the cover to be seen when stored. However, I never thought about the soap residue affecting the covers or the paper. It was just a hints from Heloise tip for storing magazines that I tried for a summer.
After that, I commandeered a secretariat desk, and put each series in a different one of the nine different drawers, pilled neatly on top of one another. then I got another, and another desk in my room as my collection swelled in the last half of the 60s! Finally my mother put a stop to my furniture hording!
How about you? How did you keep your comics before the collector's market convinced us to bag and board our comics, slab and seal in mylites, mylars or lucite slabs?
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Well, when I got serious about buying comics -- that is, when it wasn't enough to wait for new comics each week and I started seeking back issues to buy -- I used to keep them in the same bags with boards they came in. Then when I started collecting runs of titles, such as Master of Kung Fu, Tomb of Dracula, All-Star Western/Weird Western Tales, Our Army at War featuring Sgt. Rock and others, I started putting them five to a bag or even 10 to a bag, to make them easy to count and track. Bags for pre-1980s comics are a bit wider and deeper, as the comics themselves were wider and longer. So you can put more than one comic in a bag without any harm.
But, frankly, I haven't bothered with putting my comics in bags for quite some time.
I do put them in boxes, but I now only buy the short boxes; they're much easier to handle.
I had mine in a big cabinet for a while.
Once I decided to become a collector I actually got 2 long boxes fairly quickly. I traded for them at the very first comic book convention I went to. I helped another dealer load up his van after the con, and he gave me 2 empty very used long boxes. The last of them completely fell apart a year or so ago, but it had a long run.
When I was talking to the owner of Lone Star Comics he said they used to store comics in chicken boxes. They were these wax cardboard boxes that restaurants received chicken in, and they would pick them up and clean the boxes out thoroughly. Sounded like a beating to me.
Like Kirk, I started collecting long before there were bags and boxes for comics. I kept mine laid flat, usually alternating the spines to avoid one side getting high and stored them in a dresser drawer or in boxes that were just the right size. When that got too small, I started stacking them in grocery bags, with the title or groups of titles on masking tape on the outside so they could be switched when needed.
At some point, I finally bought a big batch of short boxes via mail order, along with several packages of magazine-size bags. I put as many comics as fit from one title into a bag (usually about 25) and stacked them in the boxes. As my collection grew, I would shift around titles to fit them into the boxes (Batman and Detective would be together until they had to be separated, and B&B wound up with WF) and buy new boxes as needed.
That's pretty much how I still have them. The short boxes fit nicely onto shelving facing out and are easy to pull out and restack as needed. Sometimes, I keep a group together in one bag, like the Avengers-Defenders crossover or all the Flash-Superman races, as that's how I'd read them, and my collection is stored for reading, not as much for collecting. Over the years, as I've bought comics in GA or other mid-size bags, I use them to store smaller groups of comics, like mini-series.
I keep track of them all just with a Word document, printed out in a notebook that I update with pen until it's time to update the file and reprint. It's not ideal, but it works pretty well, as long as I keep it updated.
-- MSA
I can't believe that at one time, I started typing out 3x5 index cards with my review of each comic I bought, cover, title, artists, characters, etc starting with Marvel Super-Heroes #12-13-14 and then Captain Marvel 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 before I tired of this and realized that this would be a never ending process.... so I abandoned it. I have no idea where those cards are, but I do recall why CM #7 was so significant for me. Anyone who owns a copy of this issue, the first to change it's official masthead/title, will want to flip to the letters pages.
Like Kirk and Mr. Silver Age, I started thinking like a collector a few years after I started reading comics. Before bags, boards, and comic boxes were available, chests of drawers were the first place I stored them, which was after I started following JLA, Flash, etc. Then there were cardboard expanding file folders (with elastic bands) and three-ring binders with clear plastic sleeves. I finally went to boarding, bagging, and comic boxes. When I sold most of my comics they could tell (uncannily) how they had been stored before boarding and bagging. It had affected the condition to a certain degree.
Pretty groovy (not to mention weird and exciting), Kirk! Did you write many letters? Did you get a card or anything back, or did you just pop up in the issue?
-- MSA
I confess, I don't recall if I got a blue post card from Flo informing me that my letter would appear. However, over the years, I did get several of them and at least TWO #10 envelopes printed with Green lettering declaring I had won a "no-prize". I think I still have them with my FF collection.
Did I write many letters? I learned by example in every comic that Marvel wanted feedback, so I wrote long single spaced, typed letters to them for each book that came out. I must have gotten over 60 letters out and mailed before I tired of it and stopped. Fortunately, the single letter ever printed was a drooling fan-boy letter praising the last Gene Colan story in CM #4 before the artwork and stories went to crap! CRAP,I say...
Unfortunately, my mother had shown me how to "repair" rips in magazines with Scotch tape, and so I went through all my earliest FF's and taped up the holes and perferations in the white margins of the pages. The tape aged, the adheasive dried out, and now there's this odd box that brackets virtually ALL the rips or slight tears in a fragile newsprint paper that was used at the time! (Who knew back then?)