I have put together this article after many customer requests about the right and wrong way to store your much loved autograph collection. Too often I have seen wonderful vintage items that have been poorly stored or displayed, reducing them to second rate junk fit only for the 99p bargain bin!
It takes little effort to store them in such a way that they will look as good ten years from now as they do today. If you are spending a lot of money on autographs and intend to pass them on to others, or perhaps cash them in as an investment later, then take the time to store them carefully, I promise it will be well worth it!
I’m only going to cover storing autographs and signed photos inside sleeves on these pages, as the storage, preservation, framing, mounting, and repair of these things will be covered in a separate article. The article can seem a bit too technical at times, but I think by giving you the facts, you are much less likely to use the wrong products.
So how do you currently store your collection? Is my money in PVC sleeves and ring binders? Or maybe just a cheap folder from a chain store, or even worse, an old cardboard box? Well, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that all these methods are degrading your collection as we speak.
So, let’s start with those sleeves, as they will do the most damage to your collection. The most common type of plastic sleeve is made of PVC (polyvinyl chloride) or at least a very similar material, which means that a “plasticizer” has been added to it during manufacturing. This ‘plasticizer’ is what keeps the sleeve flexible, the more they add the more flexible (plastic) it becomes, but unfortunately for us it also means that it has a similar effect on many of the inks used to sign the autographs stored within them as that the plasticizer acts as a sort of solvent on the ink, much like a solvent softens paint.
This effect is particularly noticeable with paint pens and metallic type markers, as the plasticizer will absorb some or even all of the ink, causing the ink to partially adhere to the plastic sleeve rather than to the photo. The same plasticizer can, over time, affect certain photos and images as well, so you could end up not only with a disappearing signature, but also with a disappearing or distorted image.
In addition, during the manufacturing process, the PVC passes through rollers coated with fatty acids (to prevent the material from sticking to them). As a result, both sides of the pockets (and this includes the top loaders) are contaminated, and we don’t want fatty acids coming into contact with our autographs, right?
Note. You may sometimes read that you can ‘smell’ the cheaper casings, and that proper acid free casings don’t have that smell, but that’s not entirely incorrect, and could well have something to do with the aforementioned ‘fatty acids’! previously!
How many items should I put in each sleeve? Ideally just one, but we don’t live in an ideal world, so two consecutive photos should be the maximum. If you do this, make sure you put an acid and lignin free separator between the photos. Because? Well, photo paper contains acid and lignin, and these chemicals break down the paper and turn it yellow (which is why old newspapers turn yellow). So having them next to each other will age photo paper twice as fast, turning your precious autographs yellow even faster. Storing only two photos per sleeve will also reduce the risk of scratching each image upon removal.
If you store multiple photos in each sleeve, you may have noticed the way some signatures are reproduced on the back of other photos. This again is caused by the chemicals within the photo papers acting on the inks, and is yet another reason why you should only store 2 back-to-back signed photos in a sleeve.
I do not recommend storing more than one album page or signed card per sleeve, as I have seen the effects of one sheet of high acid paper on another when stored in this situation. Some inks can also transfer from page to page, so this is something to keep in mind as well. There are special multi-pocket sleeves for smaller album pages etc, so you don’t have to waste an A4 sleeve per item.
Since you can only store two photos per sleeve, it may be worth adding a divider to help prevent damage from bending and cross contamination. If you’re going to do this, make sure any hardeners you use are again acid-free; otherwise, you are simply taking a step back. You can buy acid and lignin free splitters for this purpose, and these are usually available from the same suppliers as the sleeves. See my note on this at the end.
The solution to the sleeving problem is to use sleeving made of polyester, which is stronger, optically much clearer, and most importantly, doesn’t contain those horrible plasticizers or fatty acids!
Polyester (synthetic rather than natural) is a type of plastic, most commonly sold under the trade name ‘Mylar’, although you won’t normally find that name used. These polyester sleeves are more expensive, but in my experience they are stronger and will last much longer than the cheap plastic sleeves from Staples or elsewhere, and of course they won’t damage your valuable collection either.
You’ll find polyester sleeves much harder to locate, and the staff at Staples certainly won’t have a clue what you’re talking about if you ask for polyester or Mylar sleeves, so don’t bother asking! You may find ‘copy safe’ sleeves, although I’ve never seen any that state they’re polyester, and I think they’re advertised as ‘copy safe’ for the office market, and the wording copy safe refers to your safe storage of photocopied items only. Even then I certainly hope they don’t have any kind of guarantee that could really mean anything! So my advice is to avoid these.
Now you may be wondering how I know what a polyester cover looks like if I’ve never seen one. Well, because they are more expensive than common or garden PVC sleeving, they will normally be branded or sold as such, since they are sold with the conservation market in mind. Once you’ve seen a polyester cover and compared it to a regular cheap cover, you’ll immediately see and feel the difference in quality.
In case you’re thinking photo books or the like, I’ve looked at hundreds of photo books in many different stores, from Harrods, through specialty photo shops, to Staples and even Poundland, and they were all the same: cheap plastic sleeves. , cheap cardboard pages, or even worse, those horrible pages with adhesive lines to hold the photos, phew! If you have your collection stored in something like this, then hit yourself up and order them right now!
Note. The Frequently Used ‘Top Loader’ is not made of polyester and should not be used to store your signed photographs for any length of time. They can be useful for transporting newly signed photos from a show, but that should be your limit of use. Photos can also stick to top loaders very quickly, especially if the photos were recently developed and the top loaders were recently made, so be careful! Top loaders are the hard plastic sleeves in which only the top edge is open, and are often seen at shows or by some distributors to ship items.
So remember, it’s the polyester sleeves you’re looking for if you want to store photos or anything with a signature.
One last thing, if we lived in an ideal world, we would always handle all of our inventory wearing lint-free cotton gloves. This is due to the amount of oils and the like that sit on our skin, which then gets onto our precious autographs every time we handle them (did you wash your hands after eating that sticky bun?). Those fingerprints on all your photos are there because of all that junk, and much of it will damage your photos and may become impossible to remove later. White lint-free cotton gloves are readily available at any good photo store, a pair will not only last you a long time, but will also prevent all that dirt from sticking to your prized collection.
Everything I’ve written here comes from my twenty years of experience dealing with autographs and making the kinds of mistakes I’ve mentioned here. You can’t bake a cake without cracking eggs as they say, and I’ve certainly cracked a few in my time! So I hope you’ll take what I’ve written into account and that it will help you keep your collection in the condition it should be.
I hope you have enjoyed this article and that it has been interesting and informative. I’ll cover storage, preservation, presentation display, and mounting and framing in other articles, so keep watching!