#oneaday Day 356: Shelf

I'm not a hugely super-organised person in my everyday life, as the "ring of chaos" (as my wife occasionally refers to it) around where I typically sit on the sofa will attest. But I do enjoy and appreciate some nicely organised shelves.

Those of you who have been following for a while will doubtless have seen my game shelves at least once by now. Well, by no means anywhere near as impressive, but already giving me a thoroughly pleasant sense of happiness when I look at it, is my fledgling manga shelf.

It occurred to me while stowing away this small collection that one of the things I particularly enjoy about being a collector of physical media is simply how pleasing a well-organised set of anything vaguely uniform looks when on a shelf. And I'm pretty sure manga publishers know this; look at all those spines.

Each series has its own distinct look that makes it immediately identifiable without even reading the title. Each series has a distinct colour scheme, logo design, use of fonts and pattern that makes it nice to look at by itself, but lovely to look at when there's more than one there. Look at those Monster Musume volumes. Look at Komi Can't Communicate.

In some respects this is probably both dangerous and manipulative, because it encourages people (like me, I guess) to want to expand their collections in order to improve the way they look on the shelf, and to derive satisfaction from "complete" (or at the very least expansive) sets of various series.

But in others, it's also showing understanding of the sort of person who might be interested in following a manga series over the long term. It'd be irksome if every volume of Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro had a different form factor, for example — although just blame that on Nagatoro herself and it would actually be rather thematically appropriate — so publishers appear to take care to keep the various volumes of their series consistent over the years — far more so than various editions of Western books.

I've had those two volumes of Fruits Basket for probably more than ten years at this point, for example, and yet if I were to walk into a manga shop today to try and expand or complete that set, they'd still look like that. Compare and contrast with a popular Western series like Harry Potter or His Dark Materials and, if you left a few years between volumes, you might well find yourself with a radically different looking book on yourself that doesn't "fit" with the earlier volumes. Whether or not this bothers you, of course, is down to your own personal tastes and character!

Anyway. Manga. I'm pleased with what I've got so far, and after payday rolls around I'm going to pick up a few more bits and bobs — the second volume of Interspecies Reviewers and more Plus-Sized Elf are definitely first on the list, but I also have a few other series and one-offs that I'm interested in reading, too. This is an exciting (kind of) new world for me to explore, and I'm feeling great enthusiasm for it right now… so doubtless more photos of this shelf will follow in the future 🙂 Thank you for indulging me and my Aspergers!