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Disc-Combobulation: How Christgau Stores His CDs
Compact discs aren't as compact as they're cracked up to be,
especially if you measure your storage in wall-feet: you can only
get 60 or so jewel boxes on the same square foot of sheet-rock that
will accommodate more than 80 vinyl LPs in their tattered cardboard
jackets. But CDs are shallow little buggers, more or less
uniform in size, light enough to store on hanging
shelves without tearing a hole in your neighbor's apartment, and at
five-and-a-half inches deep they consume only two-thirds the room
volume of vinyl. This means you can stick them almost anywhere.
Since they're also expensive little buggers (these days, with
manufacturing equipment amortized, they cost producers no more than
cassettes or vinyl), casual music lovers often own only a few dozen
of them, in which case, as the editor of Ladies Home Journal
remarked on the Pathmark public-address system recently, a shoebox
makes an excellent CD holder.
I am not a casual music lover, and my study was crammed with
oft-weeded LPs, most of them stored in (and sometimes warped by)
simple, cheap, used metal industrial shelving, painted blue, when
I decided to switch formats in January, 1990. Each seven-foot,
six-shelf unit holds about a thousand LPs; I have three plus some box
shelves in the study, two more out in the hall, four or five more
in a warehouse. Since the '70s I've stored cassettes on tiny
shelves supported by stove bolts fastened to the sides of the LP
units, but as my permanent collection grew, I devised a more
permanent solution. Cassettes are really shallow little buggers,
only two inches wide,
and remain easily accessible at the
cost of no appreciable room volume as long as you stand them up like
books. Individual dividers for each cassette cost money, waste
space, and force you to shift whole rows one by one every time you
insert a new tape alphabetically, which is the only way. My design:
drawerlike, 2"-deep, 30"-by-40" boxes with half-inch shelving 4½"
apart. Made to order at an unpainted furniture place, they cost
about 30 cents per cassette stored, an improvement over vastly
inferior competing systems. Mass-produced they'd be even cheaper.
(Sure they would.)
The same principle applies to CDs--store them upright,
undivided. Anything else is suburbia or conspicuous consumption
(which reaches a weird apogee in the overpriced wavy CD tower at
Jensen & Lewis). Good old bracket shelves work because levels are
exactly six inches apart, which makes it simple to avoid the screws
that interfere with your brackets every foot; I've attached three
sets to the sides of the file cabinets in my study. Unfortunately,
most retail options employ dividers, probably because some marketer
thinks separate compartments make the expensive little buggers seem
more special. The only exception at Tower is the Allsop CD
organizer ($19.99), foot-wide black plastic modules that can be
hung or stacked after you snap them together. I like the plastic
tension bars that hold up the CDs, but don't trust the Allsop's
general sturdiness or stacking stability enough to pile all four
modules atop my LP shelves. At 20 cents per CD, it's the cheapest
CD storage I've found--cheaper even than the excessively
utilitarian (I mean ugly, and I have low standards) hanging
bolt-and-scrapwood item findable at Ikea. But my personal
favorite--perhaps because the last remaining wall in my apartment was 16
inches wide, which just fit two side by side (with room for two
more on top)--is the Trendlines media column ($39.95 in black,
white, or "natural" at Hold Everything, 104 Seventh Avenue). It's
a lot solider than than the Allsop, will accommodate the occasional
odd-sized package, and its seven shelves hold 126 CDs at 32 cents
per. A similarly configured and priced item at Ikea was available
only in lilac when I drove out, and for some no doubt metric reason
is an inch or two deeper than the Trendlines, which at precisely
six inches doesn't get in the way much.
Of course, real collectors toss the cases, save the booklets
(and discs), place both in nonabrasive plastic envelopes, and file
in drawers or boxes. But I'm resisting. Jewel boxes still seem too
special to me.
Village Voice, Feb. 21, 1995
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