Took me 10 hours to sort a single short box by numbering

I picked up a long box of 90s X-Men books at a garage sale last weekend. Figured I'd organize them by issue number like I always do. Got halfway through issue 50 before I realized the seller had stuffed them in totally random order with no rhyme or reason. Took me from 8 PM to 6 AM to get 250 comics sorted right. Has anyone else had a box that bad?

2 comments

2 Comments

kelly.parker5d ago

Read an article about this exact thing in a comic collecting magazine a while back. They said some dealers deliberately shuffle books so you can't cherry pick key issues at garage sales. Makes sense honestly but still drives me crazy. Your 10 hour session sounds brutal but at least you got through it. I spent six hours on a box of 90s Image books once and gave up halfway through because my back hurt so bad from leaning over the table. The guy I bought them from had them mixed with baseball cards too which was a whole other level of chaos. Somehow I still went back to finish it the next day though, can't leave a job half done.

phoenixb663d ago

Actually that article got it a bit backwards. Most dealers I've talked to don't shuffle books to hide keys, they just dump boxes straight from storage without sorting. I've bought collections where the guy literally had them in the order he pulled them from a closet, which is no order at all. The 10 hour thing though, I feel that. I did a run of 90s Spider-Man once and found three copies of issue 363 before I hit issue 50. My back was shot too, had to move everything to the floor and do it in chunks.