Ewan Murphy

On 11/4/2022 at 3:46 PM, Sauce Dog said:

Here's the thing with all these new people trying out these techniques, they are only learning them from other comic fans and 99.9% of the people jumping into stain removal are only reading a certain book or visiting a select few FB groups...none of them are trying to actually read the academic industry stuff on actual conservation. What that means is you have all these people explicitly doing 'conservation' that only amounts to short term visual changes in order to get a grade bump and then flip the book (and make no mistake, they ain't aiming for conservation - they all talk about dodging that designation and getting a universal blue label). NONE of them actually know the essential treatment parameters to consider when using hydrogen peroxide that would actually CONSERVE THE BOOK. Few are doing work that will conserve the book for the longterm - they just want that grade bump in the CGC case and once its in there who cares what happens to the materials down the years.

The majority of actual paper conservationists (in museums and other institutions) do not typically use bleaching agents on materials, those that do use hydrogen peroxide (the most popular bleaching agent, followed by light bleaching and then sodium borohydride) use a concentration between 0.5 and 3.0% (I've seen some comic people talk about using up to 20%!). However, the one thing the vast majority of them agree on is pre-treatment and post-treatment steps are mandatory! These are two things I have never seen brought up in any of the comic resources on stain removal (I have the books and am part of the groups) - the comic amateurs are just doing peroxide treatments (either full or localized via the HOP method) and leaving it at that! No deacidify, no resizing, nothing...so you now have paper that looks better but is going to be susceptible to the common concerns in the industry; brittleness, iron ions, short fibre pulp, sizing loss, lignin, color reversion etc... 

I experimented with lightening/peroxide as well, but I also made sure to read as much actual academic work on the matter as possible and found it was WAY out of my pay grade to do correctly if I was going to be honest about it. This is literally stuff best left to pros. I can still do actual conservation, but I limit myself to the stuff I know 100% is not going to damage the book down the road - I aim for an actual conservation label in my work, not try to game the system. 

As Helen Burgess said (the conservation scientist, not the actress) regarding such bleaching agents: 

Wow, what a comprehensive response! I believe that we have a lot of rumors and manipulative advice, precisely because this topic is not sufficiently studied today. Currently, I am studying publishing and printing. Therefore, I want to understand this topic as best as possible, and your answer pushed me to look for information in a slightly different direction. Recently, I found the site https://www.aresearchguide.com/edubirdie-review.html where I read a review on Edubirdie. Then I decided that I would request help in writing about similar techniques. There is really little information, and there is not enough time to check its veracity. And as you said, it's really expensive and time-consuming..

 

Wow, what a comprehensive response! I believe that we have a lot of rumors and manipulative advice, precisely because this topic is not sufficiently studied today.