A Guide to Safe Storage of Autographs and Signed Photos – Part 1, Sleeve Storage

I’ve put together this article after many requests from customers about the right and wrong ways 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 rubbish suitable only for the 99p bargain bin!

It takes little effort to store them in such a way that ten years from now they will look as good 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 worth it!

I’m only going to cover storing autographs and signed photos inside sleeves on these pages, as storing, preserving, framing, mounting, and repairing these things will be covered in a separate article. The article may 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 binder from a chain store, or worse yet, an old cardboard box? Well, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that all of these methods are degrading your collection as we speak.

So, let’s start with those sleeves, since they will be the ones that do the most damage to your collection. The most common type of plastic sleeve is made from 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 kind of solvent in the ink, just 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 the photo. The same plasticizer can, over time, also affect certain photographs and images, so you could end up with not only a disappearing signature, but also 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, do we?

Note. You may sometimes read that you can ‘smell’ cheaper holsters, and that proper acid-free holsters don’t have that smell, but that’s not entirely wrong, and might well have something to do with the ‘fatty acids’ mentioned! previously!

How many items should I put in each bag? 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 place an acid and lignin free separator between the photos. Why? Well, photo paper contains acid and lignin, and these chemicals degrade the paper and turn it yellow (that’s why old newspapers turn yellow). Therefore, having them next to each other will age the photo paper twice as fast, causing your precious autographs to turn yellow even faster. Storing just 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 signed photos back to back in a sleeve.

I do not recommend storing more than one signed album or card page 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 one page to another, so this is also something to keep in mind. 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 purchase acid- and lignin-free dividers 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 sleeve problem is to use sleeves made from polyester, which is stronger, optically much clearer, and most importantly, doesn’t contain those nasty 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 poly sleeves are more expensive, but in my experience they are stronger and will last much longer than cheap plastic sleeves from Staples or anywhere else, 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 order polyester or Mylar sleeves, so don’t bother asking! You may find ‘secure copy’ sleeves, although I’ve never seen any that state they are polyester, and I believe they are promoted as ‘secure copy’ for the office market, and the wording secure copy refers to their safe storage of photocopied articles only. Even then I certainly hope they don’t have any kind of guarantee that can 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 garden or common PVC covers, they will normally be marked or sold as such, as they are sold with the conservation market in mind. Once you have seen a polyester cover and compared it to a regular cheap cover, you will immediately see and feel the difference in quality.

In case you’re thinking of photo albums or the like, I’ve looked at hundreds of photo albums in many different stores, from Harrods, to specialty photo stores, to staples and even Poundland, and they were all the same: cheap plastic sleeves , cheap cardboard pages, or even worse, those horrible pages with sticky lines to hold the photos, ugh! If you have your collection stored in something like this, then take a swing 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 period of time. They can be useful for transporting freshly 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 shippers are the hard plastic cases where only the top edge is open, and are often seen at shows or by some dealers to ship items.

So remember, it’s the poly 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 get 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 on. White cotton lint-free gloves are readily available at any good photography store, a pair will not only last you a long time but will also prevent all that dirt from sticking to your valuable 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 breaking the eggs as they say, and I’ve certainly broken a few in my time! So I hope you take into account what I have written and that it helps you keep your collection in the condition it should be.

I hope you enjoyed this article and that it was interesting and informative. I’ll cover storage, preservation, presentation display, and mounting and framing in other articles, so keep looking!