Drac of the Sharp Smiles wrote:You know what I would love, Sensei, I would love to see a checklist of the maintenance things you do for your cels. I also have a HUGE collection that I've got very carefully STORED.... but, other than viewing, I don't actually DO much to them.
Sorry if I made it sound as if I had a huge list of tasks. I'd say lately most of the patient work has been with my sketch collection. There I'm:
1. Making a complete "finding list" of what I own. I realized at the end of last year that there were nice sketches that I had which I'd completely misplaced. I knew which room they were in, but I couldn't put my hands on them. (My art boards for
Mushishi were the hardest to find, which I finally did last week.) So mostly I'm going through boxes, organizing and recording their contents. While doing so I'm
2. Adding acid-free cardstock backing boards to the sketch bags so the sketches don't bend or dog-ear. I'm separating the sketches on white paper from those on colored paper (higher acid content) and adding MicroChamber paper to the bags. This will, I'm told, help hold back the process by which paper becomes brittle and yellowed.
For cels I regularly give cel books "the sniff test." The plasticizer that pastes trace lines onto acetate has a distinctive smell, and if I get a big whiff of that, I consider the cels healthy. In any case, like your experience, I have not been able to see any visible deterioration, except for the one cel that I framed and hung in my office for about nine months, which faded dramatically in places where there was brown/orange paint. Since being removed from the frame and returned to a cel book, it has remained stable at that condition for ten years.
I give all new cels a new cel bag. When I see that this cel bag is seriously puckered, I change it. I don't have a set schedule for this: probably every 3-5 years. I've heard that some curators change bags every six months, but this seems unnecessary, since I haven't seen any sign of deterioration under my regimen.
For many years I just tucked the douga behind the cel in its plastic bag. Now I'm gradually locating these sketches and giving them bags of their own. (When I change the cel bags, I give the old bag to the douga.)
Drac of the Sharp Smiles wrote:Even after all this time, I can check if anything is going wrong but don't feel like I know what to DO about it, if something does go wrong.
That's difficult to answer. When a cel fails "the sniff test" by smelling like vinegar, it really needs special treatment. But as I understand that condition cannot be reversed or arrested. I isolate such cels and layer them with MicroChamber paper. In minor cases, that seems to be an short term solution as it eliminates the smell. (It also works for cels with that Japanese mildew smell, or second-hand smoke.) But I have a
Blue Bird set up that is now on its second set of MicroChamber layers and may be irretrievably damaged. That one is stored "in isolation" away from other cels as the fumes can cause damage to the plastic on healthy cels.
Thankfully, this problem seems to be the exception rather than the rule, so I think climate control, upright storage, and exclusion of light are adequate except for items that have been abused before they came into my hands. (Heat + high humidity seem to be the trigger for "vinegar syndrome.")
Drac of the Sharp Smiles wrote:Also, now that there are many sketches in my collection, I really need to learn how to remove tape, but admit I am TERRIFIED to try it.
The tutorial that I put up on Beta on how to do this is
here. Caution is a good thing to bring to the task, as I like to say "Primum non nocere," or "Above all, don't do anything that might hurt the sketch." But if you start with the minor sketches and see how it goes, then after a few practices you can, little by little, move to the more cherished and expensive ones. It's not a job that should be done quickly or hastily, but I find that the patient physical tasks that go into it are good therapy after a stint of hard mental work (e.g., grading term papers or writing multiple-choice tests for forensic anthropology (CGI) textbooks).
I could also put my PowerPoint tutorial on tape removal that I gave at AnimeNext a few years ago up on a download site if you'd like. PM me if you are interested.
Overall, it's a big responsibility, but, as with your involvement with your collection, it's hard to say where maintenance work trails off into looking at cels or sketches that I loved when I got them and still love a lot. I could say that working through one big box of sketches took ten days. But that wasn't ten days of back-breaking, tedious labor. It was all spare moments when I was avoiding doing other jobs and getting out all the sketches in especially loved series and really looking at them, face to face, rather than just by way of the scans I originally made. Sometimes I find myself making new scans, because the actual sketches have so much more presence than the icky scans I made in the 2002-06 era when my collection was growing most rapidly.
But, yes, my massive collecting days are gone. Not that the interest and love have diminished -- but like many collectors I've found that I have the collection that I once dreamed of having. And so it takes more and more to make me push that "bid" button and add one
more cel or sketch.
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