My Collection (3) - Serious young cinephile Shaun Heenan provides the details of a growing collection

My collection pales in comparison to those of previous entrants (David Hare and David Stratton), featuring approximately 1,100 releases split almost evenly between Blu-ray and DVD. This includes films and TV seasons, and counts most boxsets as one entry.

The Blu-rays are shelved separately from the DVDs for reasons of aesthetic continuity, and for the same reason several of the boutique labels each get their own section. Arrow films have their own shelf (alphabetized), as does the Criterion Collection, which is arranged in order of spine number. The centrepiece of the collection is a complete set of Masters of Cinema Blu-rays, also arranged by spine number. Those discs by themselves take up three full shelves (and counting).

My DVDs are more messily arranged. I separate the films I have seen from those I haven’t (this accounts for probably half of the collection), and while at one point these films were arranged alphabetically, they’re now essentially distributed around the room at random, according to what shelf happened to have space on it at time of purchase. On that front, I have long-since run out of both space on my shelves and space in which to keep more shelves.

There are sporadic patches of order within that mess, with one shelf each dedicated to storing the next twenty or so unwatched entries in the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book (chronologically) and They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They’s ranked list of films from the 21^st Century (by descending rank). These days the collection itself essentially functions as an extended to-watch list, as I’m far more likely to buy films I’ve never seen than old favourites.