Shelf Abuse - Or How To Organise Your DVDs

Shelf Abuse - Or How To Organise Your DVDs

Posted on Wednesday November 26, 2008, 16:54 by Dan Jolin in Empire States

Earth-shattering news! I’ve recently moved house. Which, aside from the usual acute stresses, has brought up a rather important issue: how do I arrange my DVD collection in my new front room? In Old House, there was no order. One section was vaguely assigned ‘favourites’, although if I’m honest, that was the most visible element and I wanted it filled with the coolest-looking titles (the Region 1 limited edition wooden box version of The (original) Wicker Man; all three extended editions of The Lord Of The Rings; the Dollars trilogy set; the vanilla disc of Commando), which would best say to visitors: “Behold My Discs Ye Mighty And Be Slightly Impressed”. The rest was a random pile gradually built up over years of blagging and raiding the Reviews Editor’s post.

I did make an effort to resolve this unseemly chaos about a year ago. On the advice of Nick “Triple G” De Semlyen, I bought a digital library which files all your titles for you by using your computer to scan the barcodes of your discs. This has the added advantage of me having a fully recorded library just in case I’m burgled by somone who has impeccable film taste and a big lorry, for my insurance claim. For a while, I became worryingly obsessed with scanning my discs and watching the covers magically appear on a virtual shelf. But after about 300 entries the novelty faded and my annoyance at the less-than-reliable scanning device (more often than not I was finding myself keying in the barcode number like a sullen teen at a Somerfield checkout) led to the abortion of the digital library project with less than half my collection recorded.

But I digress. We’re talking here about the analogue library. How best to arrange it? The first instinct is to follow the example of my music library, kick it old-school, and go A-Z. But then, if you go alphabetically by title, you split up works by the same director. It’s just not right to have Fargo, The Big Lebowski and Miller’s Crossing all stacked separately from each other. You could upset anti-auteur theorists and go alphabetically by director. But then what about franchises? A New Hope would be under ‘L’, Empire under ‘K’ and Jedi under ‘M’. Sure, they’d be near each other, but not even in the right order. Even worse, director A-Z would mess up my various ‘sets’ — for example, the Studio Ghibli ‘set’; they all look so good together, so I’d hate to split the Miyazakis from the non-Miyazakis.

What else? I once, on a particularly rainy day, rearranged my CDs by genre. But that became a headache of arbitrary pigeonholing: “So is this trance or progressive house?”. Imagine attempting that for movies. I don’t want my front room to look like Blockbuster, which means I’d end up agonising over where to file the likes of Fight Club (comedy? thriller? action?) and Aliens (action? horror? Sci-fi?), while all the Woody Allens would be divided into two sections (tragicomedy and comitragedy). No. Ain’t gonna happen.

I guess I could arrange it all chronologically (from the films of Mitchell and Kenyon to, er, Vantage Point), which would make adding new titles a cinch. Or go full-on High Fidelity and do it autobiographically chronologically — from The Empire Strikes Back (I don’t own Star Trek: The Motion Picture or Grease, which I’d seen before that) to, er, Vantage Point — while I’d be able to put all the DVDs I own but have not yet watched all in one place. Neither, of course, fully satisfies.

Well, bugger it, they’re all still in boxes up in the spare room, anyway. I couldn’t even find my copy of Jerry Maguire (which I’ve still never seen) if I wanted to. I’m not likely to get around putting up all the required shelves for months, so there’s plenty of time to mull it over — and any suggestions, of course, are most welcome. One thing’s for sure though: the TV DVDs and movie DVDs are not going to mix. These things are Important.