Protecting My RPG Collection

Initially my RPG collection stood on bookcase in my bedroom at my parents house. When I left for college I can't recollect exactly where I used to keep the books & magazines. I'm sure the "essentials" went with me to polytechnic but I assume the bulk of them remained at my parents house.

I never really acquired enough RPG material for storage to be an issue in those early years but I can remember that when I finally moved out of my parents house when I was 26/27 I took my RPG stuff with me and have a vague recollection of it collecting dust in a spare room in the house I was renting before collecting more dust in a spare room in the first house I bought when I was 28.

Two moves later and more dust collection and in 2003 I found myself moving abroad to take up a job in Sri Lanka and looking to rent our house in the UK out so I boxed my entire collection up in a couple of boxes and dumped them up in the attic with only a minimum of precautions. I still rue throwing my collection of White Dwarf, Imagine & Adventurer magazines away thinking I would never use them again ..

And so there my RPG books remained, despite me returning to live in the house again in 2007, until 2017 when my interest in RPGs was sparked again and I braved the attic to locate my books. Certainly more than luck than judgement my RPG books remained intact with no water, rodent or any other noticeable type of damage.

So I cleared out the book case in my bedroom and brought my entire collection down from the attic and stored it on the bedroom bookcase. I started adding to my collection rapidly and decided not to leave my RPG books condition to chance but invest in some protection for it.

40 Sheet Plastic Wallet

I decided to leave the hard backs as they were but to place all the softbacks into plastic wallets. Looking around on Amazon I soon sourced two types of plastic wallets I liked.

150 Sheet Plastic Wallet

They both were A4 sized, had poppers to help seal the wallet, ring binder holes so they could be stored in ring binders and were side opening. The difference between them was simply the number of sheets they held, one held around 40 sheets, the other around 150 sheets.

The wallets easily held A4 sized sheets and booklets and the side rather than top opening meant that it was easier to slide the contents in. The poppers were easy to open and close so all in all they turned out to be an ideal solution as far as I was concerned. I haven't yet found a softback book too large to fit into the larger of the two wallets

Left is 15mm, Right is 25mm

The next decision was which A4 binders to use. There was a lot of choice but I wanted flexible rather than rigid folders with the ability to insert a label into the spine as I intended to create my own spine labels and print them off. I found what I was looking for on Amazon and settled on two sizes, 15mm and 25mm, the size the width of the spine and consequently dictating how many pages they could hold.












Fitting the plastic wallets into the A4 binders is easy and the only issue I really found was being ruthless in upgrading the size from 15mm to 25mm binders if the 15mm binder started to get full.

The spine inserts were fairly easy to create. I just used Word and created a table with the page in landscape. It took a little bit of trial and error by printing off the page , cutting up the spines, trying them in the ring binders and then adjusting them in Word and repeating  until I had them how I wanted them.

Screen shot of my Word document

Note that the spines also need to cover space on the front of the folder too. I sourced the logos off the internet.

Old Bookcase

As I mentioned above originally I had my RPG collection in a bookcase.

New adjustable shelving

But the bookcase was soon overflowing so I purchased some adjustable shelving (I used the Algot range from Ikea) and this was a noticeable improvement!

New adjustable shelving

Of course, all this comes at a cost. Each plastic wallet is approximately £1 and each binder £1.75 so any softback books I now purchase I add at around £3 per book to include protection for them. The cost of the adjustable shelving was several hundred pounds which will probably work out at less than £1 a book when the shelves are full.

However, all in all I'm pretty pleased with the system. It provides room for all my RPG books to stand vertically with the softbacks safe from damp and dust. Of course, I need to remember to take all the hardbacks off a couple of times a year for dusting but that's really no big hardship.

Printing my own spines means I can easily identify where any books are and can easily move books between folders as I can just print off an updated spine fairly easily.