It may be Saturday, but for today's Shelf Porn class is in session. Matt Silady, chair of the California College of the Arts' MFA in Comics Program, shares his robust collection of graphic novels and trade paperbacks, which also serves as a lending library for his students. Matt's a comic creator himself, whose The Homeless Channel was nominated for an Eisner a few years back.

You can find out how to submit your own shelves to us right here. And no let's hear from Matt ...

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Recently I helped establish a new MFA in Comics at the California College of the Arts. We had a poster commissioned to celebrate the creation of the new program. I framed a copy, took a picture of it, and posted the photo on Facebook. That's where this edition of Shelf Porn got its start!

My collection is a humble one. It has gaps and false starts, and a whole lot of odds and ends. But it's a lending library for my students. Books are constantly coming and going. Here's a shot of that program poster and a few of the comics that first caught the attention of Robot 6:



And here's a better shot of the collection. It's also where my wife and I have dinner every night:



I love teaching comics. So much so that I enjoy having a collection of books with broken spines that have been read and reread and loved and lost and returned again years later no matter what shape they end up in.



I'm also starting to run out of room.



I shelve them by title rather than company or creator or genre. Shelving this way makes them easy to find and easy to lend. I'm always adding new things. Here's a quick rundown of some of the titles currently on the shelves. If you see anything that you haven't heard of or something that intrigues you, please let me know. I'd love to fill you in:





















Looking forward to integrating some of these oversized editions with the rest of the collection someday:



Along with another stack of oversized books, I have 40+ editions of Best American Comics 2008 that I use in the classroom each semester:



Big thanks to Robot 6 for giving me a chance to show off this growing collection. Teaching comics could possibly be the greatest job in the world.

For more information about CCA's new graduate comics program check out our homepage and say hi over on Facebook.

Thanks Matt! If you’d like to see your collection featured here on Robot 6, here’s what you need to do:

1. Take some photos and save them as jpgs.

2. Write a little something about your collection

3. Send them to me in an email.

Some additional tips:

1. Although we don’t have a minimum or maximum limit on photos, usually 10-15 should suffice. They also don’t need to be huge, so if you can shrink them down so they are less than 1000 x 1000, that would be great. You can help make your collection look nice by being sure to focus, use the right lighting, dust your shelves beforehand, etc.

2. You can either write something up that’ll appear at the beginning of the post, or you can describe each item. Be sure to indicate where each image should be placed within your write-up, but don’t embed the images into a Word doc. Just put the file name in brackets where you want the image to appear.

3. When sending images using something like YouSendIt or DropBox, please keep in mind that I may not get to your submission for a month or more, so make sure you don’t delete them or that they won’t expire.

4. Please include your name (just your first name is fine) and location with your write-up.