How I Conquered Space
Anyone with a large compact disc collection will understand the difficult choice I faced: get rid of several hundred CDs (at least), build a wing on the house to accommodate the collection or find a way to make the existing shelves hold more. The point of desperation was approaching, fast. Then a friend casually mentioned that he had found the solution to his own CD space problem. The answer was vinyl sleeves sold by a company called Jazz Loft. I told him that my concern was not being able to keep the booklets and tray cards with the discs. That is why transferring all of the music to an iPod was not a consideration. Look at the demonstration on the Jazz Loft web site, he said. I watched the demo video and ordered 100 of the sleeves to test the system. The test satisfied me. I ordered a thousand. I'll no doubt order a thousand more.
As Alex Ross of The New Yorker points out in his testimonial on the site, one CD now takes
up about a tenth of the shelf space it did in a conventional jewel box. The small downside is that in the sleeves the spines of the tray cards are not as easy to read as they were in the jewel boxes. Filing alphabetically, I have no trouble finding the CD I'm looking for. Random browsing is slightly more difficult that it was, but that is a small price to pay for the gain of space.
I have no connection with Jazz Loft other than as a consumer; no endorsement deal, no price cut. I'm sure that there are other companies in the vinyl sleeve game, but this is the one with which I'm happy. If passing along the information helps other Rifftiders who suffer from the effects of CD proliferation, I'm even happier.
My wife asks what I'll do when all the shelf space is taken by the sleeves. I'll face that problem when it comes. By then, Steve Jobs will probably have perfected a brain implant connected to all of the music in the world. There's a scary thought.
Transferring the discs from hard plastic boxes to soft vinyl sleeves takes time. I use it to catch up on my listening.
Does anybody want to buy a thousand empty jewel boxes?
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