Manga Collecting Tips and Advice | Starting and Maintaining Your Manga Library

whether you're just starting to collect manga or you've been doing it for a while this video is going to have tips and advice on budgeting starting your collection keeping things nice and clean maintaining your collection organization and hunting for some rare books so stay tuned [Music] [Applause] not long ago my wife actually came to me with this idea that seeing a lot of the comments that i was getting on my videos people were asking questions basically just about beginning to collect a lot of really basic uh inquiries about what to do to start collecting or to maintain the collection that you have she said it'd be a really great idea if i made a video covering these topics so i decided yeah i started putting together all my ideas for that and then i reached out to you all the community the viewers and stuff to let me know what topics you would like me to cover in a video like this so we put together a lot of that information and kind of got this video put together with all that and um so we're gonna go over everything that you guys asked about and i think that we got it down pretty well to a pretty comprehensive um advice video here so one of the first things though is that people asked for me to talk about how i started collecting manga and so we're gonna go over my like origin story real quick and i'm gonna zoom through it um in this video but if you all want more information about how i started collect i can do that in a separate video later and that's going to lead directly into my advice for how to start collecting and how to start budgeting for your manga collection so i've been into anime and stuff since before i was 10 years old watching the stuff that everyone did you know stuff like dragon ball z uh watching pokemon digimon sailor moon and all that and my grandfather took notice of the fact that i enjoyed those things and one day when he was out shopping he saw a copy of the monthly shonen jump magazine so he brought it home and gave it to me and you know knowing what i liked he thought i would enjoy it i'd never read any manga before aside from you know the off-handed little pokemon magazine hero there um so it was interesting for me to dig in and start reading the original versions of stuff like dragon ball z and yu-gi-oh but i skipped over all the stuff that i was not familiar with until months later after he had given me about four or five magazines i decided to jump in and start reading the stuff that wasn't as familiar in the west in the magazine of time there was stuff like shaman king and naruto in one piece and very quickly i fell in love with these series and i wanted to go back and start buying the volumes with the early material that i had missed since he didn't get me the magazine until issue number eight or so so the first volume of manga that i bought was volume one of one piece the old first print with the foil cover and from there i bought you know a couple volumes of that a couple of volumes naruto to keep up with the stories that i had missed from those early issues of shonen jump now in the magazine eventually they started putting previews for upcoming series that they were going to publish outside of the magazine stuff like jojo's bizarre adventure and hunter hunter and i shield 21 and many other things and those previews started to really entice me to want to buy these other titles and the problem was i was only 13 years old i couldn't get a job and all i had was about five bucks a week that my parents would give me as an allowance and pretty soon that five dollars a week was not going to be enough for me to buy all these series that i wanted so in all of these new manga that were coming out that i really wanted to buy and really wanted to read i wound up asking my parents you know what can i do to earn more money around the house i'm interested in buying things i don't have the cash for it and my family was really happy to give me the opportunity to do different things and this is going into my advice for if you are around that age or you're in an age where you're in school and maybe not able to get a job you might find that doing what i did could work for you as well i know not everyone's going to have that same opportunity but this is what wound up happening my dad and eventually my grandfather also both let me know that if i wanted to get more money i could mow their lawns and so i wound up getting three different lawns that i would mow every other week and for each lawn i would earn twenty dollars and so at the end of everything three lawns twice a month plus the you know weekly five dollar allowance i was getting about 160 bucks a month that i could spend on whatever i wanted and given that i was a kid i didn't have any responsibilities that i had to you know use that for bills or whatever now i know that not everyone's going to have you know you might live in an apartment or something you don't have a lawn to mow but the point here being that if you're younger and you'd like to start your collection at a young age like i did you might have the ability to talk with your family talk to people in your family your parents aunts uncles older cousins grandparents to see if there's anything that you might be able to do i gave the same opportunity to my nephew because he wanted to buy some shoes we told him hey you can do what i did i'll let you mow the lawn and we'll give you some money for that if you put in the work it's a good way to you know i know my parents were happy about me wanting to do that because it was a good way for me to kind of earn the value of my work and the value of a dollar at the same time being able to put it towards the stuff that i wanted now of course if you're older you're not going to be in that same position and budgeting is less about earning the money to buy the stuff and it's more about budgeting for everything that's necessary in your life while having some left over to figure out you know how you're going to use that towards your hobby towards your interests and of course you know when you're older you wind up getting more bills and at this point in my life you know we've got mortgage and worry about groceries and gas and paying for our dogs health and whatnot and all these different things that we have to worry about on a monthly basis budgeting everything is really important you want to make sure that whatever your income is you make sure that you have enough for all that stuff first necessities will always come first after that whatever you have left the biggest and most important piece of advice that i have don't use all of it towards buying the stuff that you want use a portion of that and i'm not telling you how much you know you can break it down however much you think is a good idea whether you want to do a 50 50 split of that money that's left over after your bills or if you want to do you know 25.75 whichever way you feel is fit for you but it's important to have some of that money left over and i'm not trying to get you know really into financial stuff here but the reason that this ties into what i'm saying here is because i've seen way too many times at fellow collectors who basically don't leave money in their savings and don't keep money basically in case of emergency don't have a rainy day fund wind up having a situation where maybe they have a sick pet or they get into an accident their car breaks down or anything related to that and i will see people come out and say hey i need to get a thousand dollars to pay for this thing i don't have any monies and they wind up having to sell a large portion of their collection that otherwise they wouldn't have wanted to do and that's why i think this is this pertains to this discussion and it's important to keep savings keep that rainy day fund so that you don't have to do something you don't want to do like sell off a big piece of your collection with whatever money that you budget from your earnings to use on a monthly basis or a weekly basis or whatever let's just for the sake of this video i'm gonna say you have a hundred and fifty dollars per month that you're using towards your budget whether you're younger and you earn that from cleaning the house or mowing the lawn or if that's what you have left over from your income that you're going to allow yourself to spend on your hobbies 150 now the question here is how do you know what to buy what do you get what i'm focusing on is mostly going to be looking at new releases and if you're starting up now you are definitely going to want to buy a lot of older stuff and consider that of course you know what you want to purchase consider what you want to get into by testing the waters first is a really good piece of advice i knew what i wanted to purchase because i was reading those previews from the showing jump magazine i knew that i was interested in dragon ball z and yugioh and yuihaka show because i had watched those anime before and i knew that i wanted to own those series i wanted to read those original manga and you can do the same thing yourself by using everything that's at your fingertips we have apps like the shonen jump app it's just two dollars a month you can subscribe to that and you have access to tons of manga and you also have access to everything on the viz media app and the vis media website as well again for just that same two dollars a month that's a really good tool to utilize to kind of decide whether or not you're interested in something and would like to invest into buying it as well you can try out different anime there's plenty of anime that are available on different streaming services if your family already has subscriptions to hulu or netflix you have tons of series that you can try out on there you try watching something like seven deadly sins you decide that you enjoy it then you decide you know what i'd like to start buying that manga as well crunchyroll has a lot of material on there and you don't have to sign up for a subscription you don't have to pay for their service there's a lot of stuff that's available to watch with commercials and that's a really good way to keep up with a lot of stuff that's coming out in japan as well and again it's a good way to know if i enjoy watching the current season of jojo's bizarre adventure for instance then maybe i'm going to want to go ahead and buy the manga as it's coming out now for new releases this is where i have more advice and this is you know when i was buying stuff is when a lot of things were just coming out especially from viz media under the shonen jump label this is where they were really starting to push everything out i would just pay attention to the solicitations they would put out in the magazines now it's a lot easier because you can just go onto social media twitter is a really great one to follow instagram follow on facebook pages all the different publishers follow vis media follow kadansha follow whatever publishers there are that are putting out these books that you're interested in because the news is going to come out on those sites usually that's where you'll see it first often times you'll see it elsewhere before that but if you follow that you're going to get that information and you're going to be able to know what's coming out and that's great because you can know what you're going to want to save towards next i would say go to a website like write stuff anime and i'm going to talk more about write stuff in a little bit but write stuff anime has all of the upcoming stuff available for pre-order and they have all the dates on there as well and while some of the dates are going to move around you can use write stuff as a tool to figure out how much you're going to want to budget for the upcoming month or how much material you're going to want to buy and whether that's going to fit into your budget or not so what i often do is i'll go on to write stuff and look through all the upcoming stuff for the next couple of months and see how many books there are and whether it'll fit into my budget or not and if it's not going to fit into my budget then i have a couple of choices either i can eliminate things that i want and i can decide you know i didn't enjoy the first volume of that too much so i'm fine with not buying more or this one's a little more expensive than i would like to pay for that kind of type of book or if i need to find you know a little bit more to pad out my budget somewhere all often oftentimes what i will do is sell off stuff that i've decided that either i didn't enjoy it as much as i hoped i would or something that i might not read a second time i do that a lot with comics and with manga and if you're like me and you have a lot of other things from other hobbies video games movies etc then i'll often sell those things because i want to put that towards my main hobby which is collecting comics and manga and that's how i supplement my base budget if i get to a point where there's more that i'd like to buy than what is in the budget that i get for myself now a few things that i'm going to say that will help you to keep with your budget because the one main thing is do not break your budget if you set the budget for yourself keep in line with that budget do not make irresponsible decisions and live beyond your means number one and the hardest thing that will happen that makes you want to break your budget is fomo fear of missing out things will start going out of print all the time but do not fall into the fomo it's so easy to get distracted and then blow past your budget because this series is going out of print and if you don't buy it now you're not going to get a chance to get it in the future when this happens you have to just step beside yourself and realize do i actually want this because i'm interested in enjoying it or do i only want it because it seems like i might not be able to get it later in some cases you might want it because you're going to enjoy it in those cases you know figure out something that you can do by reassessing your budget in that month by selling off stuff like i was just talking about so that you can afford that but i guarantee that the majority of the time you're not interested in buying that series or that volume because of the fact that you're actually interested in it and when you buy it you'll find that that book will sit on your shelf for an extended period of time not even being read and by the time you get around to reading it there's a good chance that you might not even like it it winds up having been a waste of the money at that time and sure maybe if it's something that went out of print you could resell it for more but it's better to just not give in to the fomo in the first place set goals for yourself with your collecting this is another way to really stick to your budget don't try to collect a million different series at once if you're buying a long running series stick to that series and finish that series off before you go off and start buying something else or maybe you're collecting three or four different long running series at a time get it piecemeal get a couple volumes here and a couple volumes there that fit into your budget but don't try to buy everything at once if it doesn't fit in your budget be smart with your collecting and maybe another goal would be that you want to read everything that you own before you buy something else or reach a certain percentage of having read a certain amount of your collection before you decide to buy something else whatever goals you can set for yourself that will help you to stay within your budget and also in that manner stay in a place where you've read the vast majority of your collections instead of sitting on a lot of stuff that you haven't touched and finally buy things that you want to buy because you want to read them and enjoy them don't buy something that you feel like you're getting out of necessity don't buy something because it's popular because a lot of other people talk about it if you're not enjoying it or it doesn't come off as good to you don't worry about getting it don't worry about adding it to your collection again go back to the point where i said try things out use the apps use anime to try to test things and see if you'll actually like it instead of spending the money first and finding out later that you don't enjoy it just because something is super popular does not mean that you're going to love it now this leads of course from budgeting into where to shop and i did mention right stuff anime now if you have the ability to buy things online younger audiences you might not you might not have your own debit card or paypal account and maybe you if you don't have that you can speak with your parents and that's a conversation you have with them to see if your parents or guardians would you know let you order things online that's something that i did when i was younger there was a time where there was something i wanted online before i had my own debit card and my mom let me make an order with her card it's a conversation you can have with them but if you are able to order online my biggest recommendation again is write stuff anime now there's a lot of different reasons that i decided that right stuff was the best place for me to shop and it comes down mostly to the price and also to their selection compared to all other sites that i was shopping at for manga in the past write stuff has a wider selection because they get stuff from every publisher a lot of other stores don't get stuff from small publishers and also their discounts are pretty steep usually a higher discount than you get at other stores and they have a subscription service where if you pay less than twenty dollars per year you get a further discount so you get these things for even cheaper than that now they do allow free shipping after 75 dollars spent in an order i believe that they have free international shipping as well still at 250 or it might have gone up to 300 i don't remember exactly but they do sell internationally so if you're not in the us right stuff is a good place to go and i mentioned before that you can use right stuff to track upcoming releases also good with that is that you have the option to have them email you about when a book is available not just when an upcoming release becomes available but something that is temporarily out of stock they can send you a message as soon as it comes into stock so you can make sure that you buy it up as soon as it's back and available also buying second hand is always a great option i know there's a lot of people out there who don't exactly like shopping second hand and buying used books but if you're just looking to add a series to your collection looking at places like ebay and on facebook marketplace and stuff you can find a lot of things for very cheap you can find a lot of old library copies of books as long as you don't mind stuff that has stickers on it that you might have to clean up which i'll talk a little bit about later you can get some really nice cheap books i found library copies of series for one two or three dollars per piece i filled out a lot of my collection a lot of titles that i wanted to own by getting old library copies or old copies on ebay in lots that wind up being very very cheap now this is going to lead me into a topic that a lot of people asked me to address and that's how to find or where to find rare books there's really not an easy answer for this you're either going to have to spend a lot of time or you're going to have to spend a lot of money if you're trying to hunt for out of print books it's not like there's some magic website or store where all of a sudden you're going gonna see everything you've been searching gears for it's going to take a lot from you unless you're just lucky and sometimes you do get lucky and find stuff out in the wild for a good and cheap price now the first piece of advice here is don't only look online there are many sources online that i'll talk about but i think that a lot of people don't go exploring out in the wild as much as they could go to places like antique shops thrift stores used bookstores like half-price books or second and charles i think is another one that's really popular these places not everywhere is going to have a good selection but you never know i've been to antique shops and thrift stores that have a random selection of comics and manga and i may not find anything at 9 out of 10 places but that one off chance that i find something good that makes it all worth it most of the times if i go to half price books a lot of them know what they're selling and they adjust the price of rare books accordingly but i've had luck for instance one time i went to a half price books near where we used to live and i found a copy of the question by denny o'neil volume one and this was a book that at the time i knew was going for at least ninety dollars on ebay and amazon and stuff like that and i found it for ten dollars half cover price at half price books so i nabbed that up real quick i was really excited about that find and sometimes you can get lucky like that sometimes you'll go in there and they'll have stuff in a glass case that's multiple times cover price sometimes it'll just be cover price or whatever but you'd never know what you're gonna find and there's always something worth finding somewhere go to old comic shops as well especially those comic shops that have been around for decades and the ones that don't get rid of their old stock you'll know the ones when you visit them a lot of that manga because their demographic at those shops is more for western comics rather than manga a lot of that stuff's been sitting there for decades not moving stores like that those ones that have been there for a while that are not generally manga selling stores might have some hidden gems tucked away in the back and you never know because they might have stuff hidden away in boxes that is just not out in their circulation on their shelves but go into those places go to those places with the dingy windows that you know that have old painted superheroes on them you don't know what you're going to find and it's going to be worth it to go in there and at least explore and look around a little bit use any opportunity that you have to check these types of places if you're going out and running errands use that as an opportunity to stop by any stores that are around i used to go once every month or two and i take one of my off days and i just drive around town to all the different half-price books locations around me and usually i'd find at least one or two things of interest if you're on vacation something that i like to do is to check the shops that are around me and again you might come up empty but sometimes you might find something really cool that either you were or were not looking for always no matter what lower your expectations because honestly nine times out of ten you're not gonna find the thing that you're looking for don't go into a used bookstore thinking that you're going to find every volume of gto or initial d you might find a couple of things of interest but don't go with high expectations and you'll be a lot happier when you do that because if you find one or two cool things it'll be a big win for you now going back to looking online i did say look places offline but of course online go to places like ebay and check out their not as popular stores like mercari or facebook marketplace or maybe groups on facebook for your neighborhood or manga groups or comic groups where people are selling stuff because oftentimes you can find things on there that not as many people are aware of that are going to be cheaper sometimes you'll find people who just don't know what they're selling i saw one person who found i think it was like 20 volumes of shaman king on facebook marketplace for about 20 bucks because a person just needed to get rid of that stuff you never know what type of things you're gonna find on ebay the best feature to use is saved searches i don't personally have any saved searches right now even though there are several rare books that i'm looking for if i'm ever in a point where i am intent on finding something i'll search that item and save that search on my ebay so that anytime there's a new item in that search in that category for that name that you've searched it'll pop up and you can get notifications and check that stuff a couple times a day as much as you want and then eventually you might get lucky you might wind up finding that item that you want will pop up randomly someone might have it for a cheap buy it now price cheaper than it usually goes for they just want to get rid of it or maybe it's an auction that people just don't know about and you can snipe it at the last minute for a great price have a set price for what you're going to spend on a book this is really important and goes hand in hand with budgeting but don't go above what you would like to pay for something for me i try not to go above cover price because i don't like to spend more than the cover price plus tax and shipping maybe for you you'd be willing to spend 20 bucks on a 10 book or 40 bucks on a 25 book whatever you feel comfortable with do not go above that that's gonna save you from overspending that's going to save you from wasting a lot of time try to set that in mind your absolute max of what you would like to do and in that way if there's an auction that you're trying to win you know that you're not going to go further than a certain bid also know that just because a series or a book is rare it doesn't mean that it's going to be worth it for you to buy it's not going to be worth your time and your money to track down for instance i love knights of the zodiac and i know that a lot of volumes of that series are particularly hard to find but that doesn't mean that it's going to be a series that everyone loves in those cases i would say make sure that you at least sample a series that you're searching for if it's a rare one before you decide to put a lot of money into it because you might find that after spending so much time and money trying to buy something that you wind up not really liking it it doesn't really wind up being worth the time or the money that you put into it now my last piece of advice for hunting for rare books is try to buy series in bulk lots if you're trying to buy a rare series that has 35 volumes in it try and buy all 35 volumes at once wherever it is ebay on facebook marketplace wherever whoever's selling it try to buy all of it at once because what will commonly happen and it's happened to me multiple times is you start buying them one at a time and let's say a 35 volume series has 10 volumes that are harder to find you get those 25 easy to find ones for super cheap you get several of those rare 10 volumes maybe for a round cover price just a couple dollars more a little bit less than cover and then there's always a couple more books that are just impossible to find and you've left yourself having these two books left of a 35 volume series that for whatever reason are the only two that are going for 100 plus dollars and it's going to take you forever to find those books for a price that you're actually going to be happy with if you buy it all at once you might be spending a lot you're buying a 35 volume series it might be 400 or something like that but i guarantee it's more than likely going to be cheaper than buying each volume individually now the next part now that we've covered rare books and hunting and all that stuff is shelving and shelving is a necessity and it it can suck because you don't want to spend your money on something mundane like shelves you want to spend your money on the books you want to buy the stuff that's actually entertaining if you're looking to have a nice and organized collection in a really well put together library you're going to have to think about shelving there's a lot of different options you can get a lot of different types of shelves and here's some advice on where to find some shelves if you're trying to keep it cheap something that i've done in the past is searching at thrift stores go to some place like goodwill i found a lot of great shelves i've found full size shelves like the one behind me for 20 bucks i've found you know shelves that are about three four feet tall half height shelves compared to the ones behind me for 10 bucks you can find all kinds of stuff keep an eye out in your neighborhood maybe you're part of a facebook group in your neighborhood because people might be selling or just getting rid of stuff in the area go on a facebook marketplace see what's around you see if there are people getting rid of bookcases and bookshelves and stuff that don't want any money for it they just might want it out of their house i've done that before myself when we were moving i got rid of some old shelves and you might be able to get some stuff for free now i understand that maybe you don't want to just get something that's you know previously owned previously used and you don't want to pull a shelf off the side of the road so maybe you want to buy something that's new and there are a lot of great options and i'll go over a couple that are you know a cheaper option and then a kind of mid-priced option uh that that i think are good that i've used in the past this shelf and another shelf i'll show in a second are from target and this is a really great shelf you can see i'm using this one for dvds blu-rays video games and stuff like that this is perfect for manga now these shelves from target are not sturdy enough to hold big hardcover volumes like stuff you know from western comics like the omnibus editions that i collect but if you're putting just paperbacks and manga on it these are great shelves they're pretty good height they have a lot of room on them for a lot of different stuff and they're not that expensive this taller shelf right here i believe the price at target was about 30 for something of this size excuse the clutter over here but if you want a shorter shelf you can see this one's about half the height this one was also from target and again i'm using it you know for some of my books it works the same you know it's it's as good as the other one for manga and stuff because it's sturdy enough to hold those paper backs and this shelf was 20 from target so those are some great kind of low cost uh items that you can grab it's you know 30 bucks for one of the taller ones you can get two or three of those and really have a lot of nice amount of room and space to start putting your collection into shelves for a little bit more pricey of an option my shells of choice the ones that i have behind me are from ikea ikea has good stuff for good prices it's more expensive than target but it's not nearly as expensive as going to a little bit higher end furniture store because they are a little more cheaply made but they are perfect again for collecting manga these are billy shelves and billy shelves come in a few different sizes you have something that's skinny like this or the wider one like this and these are both tall these both go up about six feet but you can also get them at about half that height in both the skinny option and the wider option now the billy shelves have a lot of great things about them what i love about them and why i think they're perfect for manga is because they have these adjustable shelves for each bookcase you can adjust these put them higher or lower and you can add additional shelves to each case depending on what you're buying if you're using these for just standard volumes of manga like this size the size of gto that i have here this is a really great shelf to have you can maximize your space with having eight total shelves on one bookcase if you have larger volumes of manga it's gonna take up a little more space per shelf it might not fit as much stuff but it's still a really great option as well you have the option to buy extenders to go on top of these shelves whether it's the skinny one or the wide one and that for a little bit extra cost i think about 30 35 or so dollars for the extender you can add even more space if you have high ceilings you can put stuff even on top of the extender it's going to be really high up there but that'll maximize your space and give you more opportunity to store more things also if you're trying to maximize your space something that i've seen a lot of people do just to show an example is to double up because these are deeper shelves so you definitely have more space what i mean by double up is you can take a couple of volumes or just take a few volumes here stack them in front of your other stuff so you can have a second row of books in front and this is a great way to maximize space if you don't mind having some things that are not immediately visible when you're looking at your shelves and this is another shelf that i have from ikea this is a kalax or a collapse shelf and these are big cubed shelves you can see this one is a five by five okay lax this is the biggest one at least that they have right now and the great thing about this one is the way that i'm using it now is as a room divider so i'm having books on both sides you can see there's a second row of books back there not just the front row here so here's the back side of my collapse shell for chaos shelf you can see i have an entirely different section of my library on the back side so i've doubled up and these 25 cubes turn into then 50 cubes worth of space this is really great like i said as a room divider so if you're like me and you have your library maybe on one side and i have a little lounge area on the other side or maybe you put your office on one side and other stuff on the other side whatever the case is it's a great way to divide your room while also giving yourself more space to have your collection now we've talked about shelves and a lot of people also asked about organization and there's a lot of different ways that you can decide to organize it it all comes down to personal preference for me i choose to organize and divide by publisher so i have all of my vis media stuff in one place all my kadasha stuff in one place etc and i do that because i like to keep similar types of books together i also organize by size within the publisher so everything can be kind of uniform though i do have another section of my library where i organize by creator so i have sections of all of junji ito's works all of tutto munihe's works all of umiko takahashi's works just for these creators that i really love that i have a lot of their different series whatever works for you might not work for me and whatever works for me might not work for you but the best advice that i can give in organizing and something i think that a lot of people are curious about is what do you do when you buy new stuff and you wind up having to put things on the shelf you have to move things around it's just you know it's gonna happen it sucks you might not want to have to move your shelves around and stuff but for me the way that i got around making it you know a little bit easier at least is i separate my completed series from my ongoing series so anything that's ongoing i'm only moving those things when i'm putting the new books in and as well i try to give myself a little bit of space so i don't have to constantly be pushing things around so each shelf i usually pack it with a little bit extra space for maybe one or two books so that you know in the next couple of months after i've moved my books around i don't have to move everything but moving them and having the complete separate from the ongoing helps a lot because if you're integrating everything you're moving way more and i have a lot more completed series than i have ongoing so it i've done it before where i've integrated them both and it's a real pain to move all that stuff around every single month when you get new books and if you run out of space on your shelves try alternate means for storage i used to have a lot of books in my closet stuff that i didn't have room for you might be able to find other ways to store your stuff using boxes that you can seal and put away maybe under your bed high up in your closet different stuff like that i've seen people utilize very shallow boxes that are large and long and stuff like that that can easily slide under the bed and use those to safely put your stuff away there's a lot of different options for that but maybe if you have some series that you're not going to be looking at for a while you're not going to be rereading it a little bit that's a really good option to kind of store those away until you have space elsewhere for them now a lot of people also asked about keeping your library clean and that's something that is important because it's part of your home you need to keep everything clean not just for appearance but also for your health because these books do attract a lot of dust and especially if you're asthmatic that can be really bad for you and what i generally would say is whenever you're cleaning your home just take that opportunity to also clean off your shelves it doesn't take that much to just go through and dust in front of your books now i know that some people are asking about you know if you have to move your books out of your shelf and dust beneath them that's something i would recommend doing every once in a while may be organized to wear every week or so whenever you're cleaning the rest of your home the the rest of your uh collection in your library maybe you move one shelf worth of books and clean underneath those but that dust is not going to build up quite as fast as the stuff in front of your books on the shelf i do have a couple of tools that i've used commonly for dusting you could use something just like a you know paper towel and just wipe off the dust but if you have a feather duster or something specifically for dusting those are going to be really great to use so we have this washable duster and it extends and stuff that you can dust off your fan in the room as well just by reaching it up there and that's really important because if you don't dust your fan a lot of dust will accumulate and it will fall down and that will also cause a lot more mess as well speaking of accumulation of dust if you live in a house or you live you know with your parents or whatever make sure that the filters are being changed regularly when they need to because not changing those filters is going to cause a lot more build up of dust you're going to get dust regardless but you can impact how much dust there is we also have i have no idea where it came from but this dust cloth i couldn't tell you what it was or where we got it because we just found it under the sink one day we must have gotten it from someone else but this thing it has a slight stickiness to it it's not very sticky that it leaves residue on you but it's just enough to when you wipe something down it absorbs a lot of that dust really quickly now i haven't done a lot of dusting for a couple weeks so i made sure that there was something for me to at least show but even then you can't see that much on there but using something like this duster it's just real quick easy slide that by and you get a little bit of dust on there and this thing's washable so it's easy for us to just throw it in the wash and then use it again the next time that we need to and then for the cloth that i have real easy doesn't even need any sort of spray or anything and it just makes sure to keep that dust taken care of everything's clean you can stay healthy if you do have wooden shelves it might be good to use some sort of wood spray that does help keeping that wood nice and shiny but otherwise you don't really have to worry about much more than just making sure to dust now one thing that a lot of people bring up and almost everyone tends to worry about pretty much anyone that collects books of any kind is yellowing and yellowing is basically when uv rays from the sun or any other type of light will hit the pages of your books and will cause a yellow stain to appear on those pages it's something especially that's going to happen with newsprint like the cheap paper that they use for these manga and as well if you have the sunlight coming in and it's impacting the pages and causing that yellowing it's going to cause fading on the spine of your book now i grabbed this volume of bleach because it's you know from the first printing this is from what 2004 or something like that um i've had this for obviously a very long time and pretty much maybe a little bit of fading a little tad of yellowing but that's something that's going to happen over the course of you know 15 plus years i had this to compare it to a truly yellowed book and that's this copy of volume 4 of prince of tennis i had mentioned before that i've bought a lot of series online discounted in lots i've bought a lot of x library books a lot of those are going to come in damaged one way or another and oftentimes you're going to see terrible yellowing like this now this is so yellow it's pretty much brown you can see the comparison between the volume of bleach and the volume printed tennis not only is the yellowing happening on all sides of the book of course it's going to be worse on the top because that's the part that would be exposed to light but the spine is extremely faded and the coloring is off on the cover this is what happens when you have a lot of long-term exposure to sunlight with your books there's really not a way to get rid of this when it happens the best thing you can do is to try and be preventative in those situations and the best way to be preventative is to put your library in a room where there are no windows or little windows most of the time you're not going to have the opportunity to have no windows in the room but if you can block the windows out with light blocking curtains or if you have shutters or shades or whatever to block the light from coming in that's the best thing you can do to help keep your books unyellowed and keep them unfaded it is going to happen over time because even interior lights do have a little bit of the harmful uv that do impact the pages and stuff you can have something that looks more like this volume of bleach after 15 plus years rather than something that looks like this volume of prince of tennis now another thing that will happen when you buy second hand books is i mentioned you might be buying x library copies and x library copies as well as probably being a little bit yellowed on the pages oftentimes have a lot of stickers all over them that you're going to want to remove and i'll give a little bit of advice on that best thing to have on you is goo gone goo gone is going to help you to remove the stickers much easier than you could with anything else so i have a couple volumes of zach bell here and neither of them are in perfect condition but you can see with my copy of volume 23 i've removed the sticker on here and there's still a little bit of adhesive left and there's still a little bit on the front and back now these books were both completely wrapped in a tape they put this tape to protect the cover so they don't tear as easily when they're getting checked out at the library what i did instead of pulling the tape off the entire thing because sometimes when they're wrapped like that it's really hard to pull all of it off without damaging the cover i just cut really carefully with a razor blade the spine the part that i'm going to be seeing more often when it's on the shelf and that way i had the stickers on the spine exposed and this is a volume that still has a sticker on the bottom that i haven't removed but you can carefully pick that off and use something like goo gone to rub on there and take off the extra adhesive and different libraries might do different things a lot of them don't cover the entirety of the book with the tape or the plastic wrap or whatever it is that they're using they might just have a sticker on the top a sticker on the bottom or whatever whatever the case is goo gone is going to be your best friend in maintaining those books and getting them back into what i would say is at least presentable condition it looks good on the shelf you can read it it's all good now one of the last things that a lot of people were asking about was what do you do when you're moving and i've moved a lot i've moved this entire collection though smaller in the past i think eight times in the past eight years or so so it's a lot of movement for all these books and i can give a little bit of advice number one if you can i would recommend hiring movers you can hire packers as well but i've never trusted packers to pack up my books and stuff in a way that was satisfactory to me especially my hardcovers that are a little bit more i'm a little more careful with having movers is going to be great because especially if you have a large collection you can have these people who are hired to help you move it into a truck and then out of the truck and into the proper room so you're not breaking your back trying to do that if you can't afford to use movers the best thing even if you do have movers the best thing to do is not use book boxes for your books that are too large use something that's about this size this is just a box from amazon but the boxes that we used were about this size for every book that i had i think it was medium-sized boxes from u-haul might have been small i think it was medium because these boxes you can fill up really well with books and it's not going to be that heavy to pick up because you don't want to make the individual boxes too heavy that you can't lift them if you make them too heavy i've even had circumstances where using a dolly winds up you know not even working because the the base of the dolly winds up bending under their weight put similar sized books in the boxes together and just fill as much as you can with these similar sized books so i would stack everything all the way to the top fill up all the different areas fill up the box with as much as i can and then any left over crevices between the books fill that with stuff like newspapers or packing peanuts or anything else just to fill those empty spaces because the main thing that you're worried about here is going to be that the books are going to get damaged and knock against each other but if you fill up all the spaces in the box they don't have any opportunity to move and you're not going to experience damage on your books another hint when moving i labeled all of my boxes with whatever titles were in there or at the very least i'd say shonen jump number one shonen jump number two so i knew the order that the boxes were going in whenever i was unpacking i didn't have to play a guessing game every time i opened one to find out what was in there put things in a pretty organized manner and you can unpack them in a very organized manner as well so that this you're not spending as much time as you might uh unpacking and reorganizing your library now that's all the advice that i really have to give in this video um but i have a couple of things that i want to mention not to do number one going back to the beginning do not give in to fomo don't buy things out of the fear of missing out you don't need to buy everything trust me you're going to be a lot better off if you are able to stop yourself from buying every single thing that all of a sudden you feel like you need to have and this one's a really hard habit to break but try to not continue buying things if you're not enjoying it i've had a lot of series where i decide i'm enjoying it enough that i'll continue buying it or maybe it'll get better as i keep buying it because so and so says it was really good or you know the anime is getting really good review and stuff like that give yourself a number of volumes for me i usually give myself three volumes to decide whether i want to keep going with the series if by the third volume i'm not completely into it i drop it and that's that i wind up selling those volumes to someone else who might enjoy it more than i did make sure that you don't get into the habit of keeping on buying stuff because there's so many different series that i bought the entire series just out of the habit of continuing to buy it and i wound up coming to the end of it not really feeling happy that i read the whole thing and wind up selling the whole series because it didn't really do anything for me finally this is really important don't feel like you need to have a big collection overnight because of other people that you see online like myself or other youtubers that might have you know a thousand books or multiple hundred books everyone builds their collection at their own pace you're not going to all of a sudden have a thousand books two thousand books overnight i've been talking this whole time about the fact that i started collecting almost 20 years ago it was 18 years ago when i bought my first volume of manga this is a very large collection but it happened over time and it happened very steadily over that amount of time don't be irresponsible and don't believe because of things that you see that you have to catch up with everyone else your collection is going to be perfect for you in the time that you know you spend building it because you're putting your effort into it and you're putting your love of the medium into it to create the perfectly curated collection for yourself oh and and don't start collecting by trying to hunt down rare titles or starting off with a bunch of really long books start collecting with easier things things that are in print maybe a shorter title if you're enjoying stuff that's being animated right now like you're enjoying for instance something like jiu jitsu kaisen that's a really great one to start with right now because there's only nine volumes plus the zero volume available they're all going to be available in print and it's easy to get in there rather than trying to jump into a series like gto that's very out of print or a series like one piece which is extremely long or try something other short series like chainsaw man there's only a few volumes out right now it's very easy to jump into now i can do more videos in the future about great starter series for people that are trying to collect manga or different series that you might want to avoid but i think i covered a lot of the topics that people asked about and really just wanted to give a lot of advice as far as how to start getting from point a starting your collection to point b having a big library that you've curated and culminated yourself thank you so much for watching this video i hope that i was able to answer the questions that you might have had um to try and help start you with your collection or if you've been collecting for a while to help you to maintain your collection i hope that i was able to answer all the questions that people had for me and if you have any other topics that you would like for me to cover comment down below and let me know let me know you know how you started out with your collection so thank you so much for spending the time with me i hope it was informative and entertaining as always if you haven't yet click that subscribe button go ahead and do so so you're notified of all the content i put out every single week and i'll see you guys on the next one peace out

Channel: The Omnibus Collector

Views: 158,883

Keywords: manga, weeb, otaku, manga collecting, one piece, dragon ball z, demon slayer, jujutsu kaisen, chainsaw man, jojo's bizarre adventure, anime, naruto

Id: IWu64uqKMB0

Length: 45min 52sec (2752 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021