I’m a fan of a variety of disparate different things: Firefly, Alice in Wonderland, King Crimson… The depth of my fandom for each of these is different, not surprisingly, and how I choose to showcase my interests gets expressed differently. I’ve got my old Firefly DVDs mixed in with all the others, while I’ve got several shelves dedicated to Alice in Wonderland books and videos. Meanwhile, the only household evidence of my interest in King Crimson would be if you logged into my Google Music account. Some of that is due to what’s available—Alice is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year for example and has had a while longer to acrue a backlist of related trinkets, compared to Firefly which only debuted in 2002.
But my primary fandom is in comic books which, I’m sure you’re aware, has had enough time to develop a cottage industry around it. And because my interest is deeper here, I’ve got more time and money invested in comics than any of my other interests. About 18 months ago, I bought a new house and was finally able to devote an entire room to my collection. But the question I had for myself was: how do I display everything? That was when I began to develop an interest in shelf porn.
I had encountered shelf porn before, and was generally uninterested. It struck me as kind of narcissistic. “Look at all the cool stuff I have!” But when it came time to design my own space for my collection, I realized that shelf porn allowed me to see different methods of showcasing my own collection. I could investigate a variety of different display options to see what I liked and what I didn’t without having to spend any real effort and/or money of my own. While my collection is different than everyone else’s, I could see what methods worked best for displaying different types of artifacts.
But what I found most interesting as I began looking at things more closely is why a collector would choose to display her/his collection one way versus another. Cost was always a factor, of course, but what was often an unmentioned undercurrent of the descriptions was the ultimate purpose of the display. Some people clearly were just trying to surround themselves with all the things that made them happy, filling the walls (and sometimes ceiling) with as many of their items as they could showcase. Others tried creating a space where they could inhabit the very world of their fannish interest; think of those photos you sometimes find of someone who’s created a multimedia room that resembles the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Personally, I was interested in creating what amounted to a working library, where I not only had ready access to my whole collection, but also the ability to write and do research with all of it close at hand.
Now, having my own library pretty well set in a way that I like, I continue to look at shelf porn, not because I’m still searching for ideas, but because I find it fascinating to try to figure out why someone has built their collection the way they have. That says almost as much about the collector as the very collection itself!