Shelf Stories: Jérémy

Jérémy already owns the John Wick films.

He has just ordered them again. A box set of the first three, on its way to his place in Belgium, and by his own account he is waiting impatiently. When I asked what his most recent purchase was, he did not dress it up: he has the films already, but he caved for the beauty of the object.

I have asked a lot of collectors that question. That is the best answer I have had.

This is the second Shelf Stories, a series about the collectors who keep their shelves on Arkiv. The first one started in Brazil, with a man who owns Shaun of the Dead twice on purpose. This one starts in a spare room in Belgium.

The syndrome

"It's my dad who gave me the collecting syndrome."

Jérémy writes to me in French, so the translations in this post are mine, and he has read every one of them before it went up. His father keeps a VHS collection and, in a different register, about 6,000 comic books. Six thousand. I would like to withdraw from any future conversation about who has a shelf problem.

For years Jérémy's own collection stayed modest: around a hundred DVDs and a few Blu-rays. Then the discs went quiet. He moved to digital, and about 300 films ended up spread across external hard drives, tracked in an Excel file. The physical ones he tracked "just in memory," which is how most of us start and where a surprising number of us stay.

The comeback

Last year he started buying physical media again, mostly steelbooks. He took a spare room and turned it into a storage room and office, and his email has exactly one line about that room: "What a pleasure!"

The budget was there and he treated himself. Now the shelves hold about 650 films and the drives hold about 300 more. He buys 4K wherever he can ("4K is magnificent to me"), and by his count around 600 of his roughly 950 films are in 4K. "Soon it'll be 1,000!" he wrote, with a laughing face. As I write this, Arkiv reads 948 for him, so he is either rounding up or he is a man who counts.

He had one question back for me, and I don't have a good answer: is it normal that the rent per square metre on that office is higher than the rent on the rest of his home?

The shelf has rules

Directors he loves stand together: Spielberg, Tarantino, Burton, Nolan, M. Night Shyamalan, and, he adds, plenty of others (Raimi, Cameron, Lucas, Scott). Every Marvel and DC film sits in the order it reached cinemas. Star Wars, Alien, Harry Potter and Terminator are shelved by saga. His Lord of the Rings and Hobbit box sets are steelbooks, and there is a Titans of Cult collection he is particularly fond of: the steelbook designs are beautiful, and every box arrives with its own goodies and a pin, "a nice change of pace." He is one film short of a complete set. He has since added a bookcase just to house it and the other box sets.

He buys for himself. "I'm building this collection for me," he wrote, and a film with bad reviews that he found interesting goes on the shelf all the same. Arkiv's stats tell him his favourite genre is sci-fi, which he agrees with, but the shelf is far more eclectic than that: fantasy, thrillers, drama, and horror. "I love it!" Strict rules, no interest in anyone else's opinion. That is my favourite kind of collector.

By chance

He found Arkiv on Reddit while looking for a way to sort and list his collection. "I stumbled on it by chance." I would rather be found on purpose, but I will take by chance, and I will take Reddit, where a lot of collectors here started.

A database, and then some

He calls Arkiv a database: "I think that's its function." What it does for him, first, is stop him buying a film he already owns. That happened to him often before, and he even reproduced the sentence every collector has said out loud in a shop: "Oh no, I already had that one!" I once owned two identical copies of Molly's Game, so I am not in a position to laugh. I laughed anyway.

It also holds his physical and his digital films in one place for the first time. He has logged more than 700 watches, so when he wants to put something on, he can see what he has seen and what he wants to see again. For the digital films he wrote down where each one is stored, and with as many drives as he owns, being able to find a film quickly is, in his word, really pleasant. The stats do the rest. He can see at a glance whether he is missing an instalment of a series, and it amuses him to see which actor, director or year he owns the most.

He also said something kind about the platform itself: "It's simple to use, the design is really nice. I like your work!" I will take that, and try not to let it go to my head.

Where the notes field ends

A little later he wrote again, beginning "It's me again!" This time it was ideas for his digital films. Pick Digital, then refine it: the quality tier (UHD, 1080p and so on), and whether the file is Dolby Vision or HDR. The same for sound: DTS, Dolby, Atmos. And a location field, so he can type where a film lives (in his case, the name of a hard drive) and see it on the film's tile on the home page. For now, all of that goes in Notes.

I am a physical media person, and it shows: in Arkiv today, Digital is one word in a list of formats, and that is where the detail stops. The location request is the one that made me stop and think, because it is not really a digital request at all. Anyone with more than one shelf, a spare room, a storage unit, a box in the attic or a home server has the same question: where is this one? For Jérémy the answer is a hard drive, and he has been noting it for every single film, in the wrong field, because there is no right one. Like Pedro's country-of-origin and packaging requests, this is a collector doing by hand the thing the platform should do for him. Both requests are on the list now, with his name on them, and I am writing the location one to work for everyone, not just for drives.

He also asked for French again. He has been gracious about it: his English is good enough to get by, and French synopses would already be a start. I will not promise more than I can ship, here or in an email, but French synopses are on the list too, and it is a real gap that I would rather name than dress up.

The object

Which brings me back to the box set. A database will tell you that you own all three John Wick films. It will not tell you why you wanted the box anyway, and Jérémy could not tell me either, except that it is beautiful, and that he had to have it.

He owns the films. He wanted the object. That is not a contradiction, it is the whole hobby. A collection is a list of what you own. A shelf is a record of what you could not resist.

Arkiv is the platform where Jérémy keeps his collection, physical and digital, in one place. It's free, built by a collector, and there are some fun things to uncover as your collection grows. If your shelf has stories on it too, you can start yours here. Coming from CLZ Movies yourself? Here's how that move looks, and an honest comparison if you're still deciding.