I have a lot of CDs, probably more than ten thousand of them. To some, this may sound like a windfall, but it gets to be a bit of a problem after a while. When I moved from Brooklyn to the big city a few years ago and faced a drastic reduction of space, I decided to consign large numbers of the little silver wonders to a storage facility. I made draconian decisions about who was staying in the major leagues and who was going to be sent down. Elgar, for example, was condemned to storage en masse. Lately, I've been cocking an ear to Elgar again, and he's returned from exile. The question, of course, is where the collected Elgar will go when Eisler and Enesco have that shelf locked down.
A couple of years ago, I found the solution. It has almost literally saved my life, and I'd like to spread the word to any other suffering souls. It is a plastic CD sleeve put out by Jazz Loft. I'm sure other companies put out similar products, but my loyalty is to Jazz Loft, with whom I just placed another order. What you do is this: you crack open a jewel case, take out the CD, booklet, and paper liner, and transfer them to the plastic sleeve. The genius thing is that you can fold the liner in such a way that you can still read the "binding," though it's at an angle. It takes up about one-tenth the space of a jewel case. I've been able to squirrel away a thousand or more new CDs without needing an inch of extra space. The transfer process is tiresome, but you can make a festive occasion of it, as Pack can attest. I am not, by the way, in any way affiliated with the Jazz Loft company.
