Wow Peter, surely you do not clean everything by yourself. I can't imaging how you maintain such order. You must keep an inventory of your collection. How else do you remember where each piece was purchased, the correct titled name of each piece, how long you will need to hold it before the value matures, purchased price, present worth, and most of all for placement within your collection, mentally and physically.
Oh, but I DO clean them all myself, Ina. I do a couple of shelves each and every day, in rotation and, that way, the whole collection gets washed once a month. I set up a folding work table in the middle of the room, clear off a shelf, carefully placing the toys on the table in the same order they were on that shelf, wipe down the now empty shelf itself, then wash each toy with a damp cloth and q-tips if needed, finally replacing them on the clean shelf in the same order in which they came off. In case of accident in which multiple toys are disarranged, I have large photos of each group within the collection so that any segment can be easily reassembled as before. Obviously, I work around the room from the uppermost shelves down to the floor level ones. The highest must be reached on a ladder and this is becoming more difficult and dangerous for me all the time. At some point I will simply be forced to allow the way up high stuff to begin to accumulate grit ... but NOT today! I keep a computerized, cross referenced log of each collectible with date of purchase, original price, current price (which I can always look up in my reference books or online) and position within each sub set. Sub sets are displayed according to type of toy (doll, action figure, one-mold, mini-mate, etc.), then subject of toy (Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel or DC Superheroes, Universal Monsters, etc.) with a view to keeping everything easily visible while packing as much into a given space as possible--for example, placing a row of 5" Star Trek action figures, arranged first by series and then by popularity of the character, just in front of a row of similarly laid out 9" Star Trek dolls, thus doubling the use of the shelf space. Needless to say, everything is fully insured against theft, fire or flood damage or freak tornado / earthquake, costing me more each year than it does to insure the combined total of my property including my house and everything else in it! Toy collecting is NOT for the faint of heart!
I don't know what's more impressive: your huge action figure collection, or the discipline of your cats! Haha. I see that you are really big on superhero toys and collectibles, especially Marvel ones. I have to ask you: do you also collect comic books? I used to collect them until my wife got mad at me for spending money on "children's books" and she gave them away to some children in the neighborhood. I'm not that mad, though, because at least now other people have the chance of reading them, but I had some really rare issues in there. At least I can read comics online nowadays.
Wow, this is quite a collection you have here. I would love to be able to see it in person. I bet the video doesn't begin to do it justice. Its impressive how well kept it is and that the cats don't knock it over. Sorry, being a cat owner like others I just had to add that part.
Yes, John, as with the toys, I've collected comic books all my life. I specialize in golden and silver age reprints, such as those contained in the DC Archives and the Marvel Masterworks series', of which I'm proud to own complete sets! I also grab up every collected edition and graphic novel that comes along and I'm currently working on downloading the complete set of Batman comics from 1939 through 2011 from Comixology online. I recently had to add a large room to my house in order to be able to keep storing this stuff. (This is not even to mention the thousands of sci-fi novels I've accumulated and read over the decades. You can see them peeking out from behind the toys.) My late wife used to exclaim in horror over the amount of money I've sunk into my little hobby, but every time she did, I'd just completely restock her sewing room for her. I'm really not sure who was playing whom, here.
You're right, Hannah, the slideshow really doesn't quite encompass the scope of the thing. As to the cats, I used to have eight of them and, I have to admit, we had some accidents once in a while. Now, I'm down to just two who've been with me for twenty years and they KNOW by now that they must behave. I frequently hear them whispering about it ... "Yeah, Dad just goes CRAZY if you touch his toys!" ... "I know, but I REALLY want to chew up that talking Darth Vader! If only it wasn't up so high!"
Given that you said you liked the Silver Age, here is a website from which you can get over 26 thousand Silver Age comic books for free (just need to make an account): http://comicbookplus.com/ I found that it was a blessing for me when I found myself spending too much on Comixology.