Everyone has their own particular way of arranging their collections. The hero of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity famously arranges his records autobiographically – “If I want to find the song Landslide by Fleetwood Mac, I have to remember I bought it for someone in the ‘Fall of 1983’ pile, but didn’t give it to them for personal reasons.”
When I visit my parents on Boxing Day I’m reminded of my dad’s own – possibly unique – system for filing his extensive DVD collection. Not for him the staid convention of arranging his discs alphabetically. Or even by genre. My dad has shelves of DVDs stacked in historical order. Dinosaur epics such as One Million Years BC are at the beginning of his collection, while science-fiction films such as Forbidden Planet and Waterworld are at the very end.