My family and I are moving soon, and our new house is great but the room I am transporting my collection to is significantly smaller than what I have now. So this post is a tribute to my current space, because it has been very good to me. 

I have said before that you should display your collectibles if you can (I made a big deal of that here), and so I’ve worried that if I move one day I would not have the same amount of space. This was on my mind when I was interviewed about collecting and was asked “How has your passion for Star Trek influenced other areas of your life?” I answered “If I move someday, my new home has to have a large Star Trek room. I have one now and the walls and shelves are full.”

I am looking at those full walls and shelves as I type this. My current room, which doubles as my home office, is about 37 square meters (or 400 square feet). The new space is about half that. 

And the new room has a large window, which makes this worse. You know you’re a true collector when a big bright window — normally a good thing — annoys you because it reduces the wall space available to hang 8x10s and posters. 

I know I am fortunate to have a Star Trek room in the new house; there are many collectors who have all their stuff in boxes because they have nowhere to display it. But still, this is tough.

My current space

Here is a recent panorama photo. My room is 360-degrees of Star Trek. Click the photo to see a larger view, or download a higher-res version.

I also took some videos. I have seen other collectors make impressive video tours of their space. My film skills are not as strong.

Tough calls

The smaller space means I have to downsize. I need to make some cuts to what I own and also economize on how all this is displayed.

One casualty will be my big box of TOS calendars. I have almost every wall calendar from 1976 until a few years ago, and I even acquired a number from the other series. They are all in a big Rubbermaid box in storage and I never look at them, so they have to go. I will also get rid of a bunch of unopened model kits. I am not a modeller. 

And I am considering letting go of most of my Trek novels. I will keep the older ones, like Spock Must Die! and Spock, Messiah! and the terrible Mission to Horatius, but I own more than 120 novels in paper, and all those old Pocket Books take up a lot of room. Plus, I have been buying them over the last few years as e-books.

I will keep every non-fiction Star Trek book I own. I love all those.

The bigger change will be the amount of display space I have. I own 60 or 70 signed photos, posters, albums, etc., and a lot of those are on my walls right now. I won’t have the space in the new room.

I may scan all that stuff and load the pics onto a digital photo frame. It won’t be the same, but I could at least still see the items regularly. 

Earlier in this whole move process, we actually bought a different house. That deal fell through, but for a while I was trying to figure out if I could move my Star Trek life into an 8 x 20 foot shipping container, kitted out as a living space and dropped into the small backyard. That would have been even tighter.

Display your collectibles if you can. That can be one shelf or two bookcases or a full-room tribute but you will enjoy them more if you can look at them every day. Walking into my Star Trek room and seeing my Polar Lights Enterprise or my Mego display or my signed wallpaper poster or my Toronto Star Trek ’76 poster or my Ebony cover or my surprise Roddenberry autograph or my AMT Enterprise or my Heineken ad makes me happy.

Collectibles should not be in a storage box.