Paper craft materials: storage and housing

What to take away

What the guidance repeats

Read enough published guidance and the same emphasis recurs. Storage and environment come up again and again; workmanship rarely does. Objects suffer because of what surrounded them, what touched them, how damp the room was, and how often somebody moved them to look at something else.

That makes material choice largely a housing question, not a bench question. What will the sheet live in, what is that made of, and how often must someone move it to see inside?

A well-made object in a bad box loses to a plain object in a good one, consistently, over time.

Measure the space before specifying the housing

Enclosure choices only make sense once you know what the room does.

The National Park Service note on using a psychrometer to measure relative humidity covers the instruments and their limits.

Sling and aspirating psychrometers are accurate to within about two percent relative humidity when properly maintained and used by trained and practiced operators. One of their jobs is calibrating hygrometers and hygrothermographs that have drifted.

Before buying anything, take a reading: a dry, stable cupboard tolerates plastic sleeves, while a damp or swinging one needs paper enclosures.

Paper enclosures breathe and take a pencil label, but plastic shows contents and traps moisture. When you do want plastic, polyester film — sold as Mylar and Melinex — is the stable choice.

Buffered board protects against migrating acid: it carries an alkaline reserve, usually calcium carbonate, that neutralizes acid as it forms. That is also why it is the wrong answer for a few materials. Color photographs, blueprints and cyanotypes, wool, silk and leather all do better unbuffered. Sleeves are quicker, but envelopes are safer for anything with loose fragments. Whatever you buy as an enclosure, ask whether it has passed the Photographic Activity Test, designated ISO 18916.

The enclosure itself has names worth knowing. A phase box wraps a fragile book in a fitted, self-closing wrapper. A drop-spine box, also called a clamshell, opens like a shell so a book lifts out without being pulled. A solander box is a clamshell built for flat or loose material. Archival suppliers such as Gaylord, Talas, Lineco and University Products sell these, along with polyester film, buffered board and MicroChamber paper, in single-box quantities.

Standards exist, and knowing the names helps

The University of Washington Libraries preservation guide for books and paper gathers the reference points. It includes a guide on the library binding standard, designated ANSI/NISO Z39.78. It also has guidelines for transferring material from general to special collections, and IFLA guidelines for planning digitization of rare book and manuscript collections. For the paper itself, the designations to know are ANSI/NISO Z39.48 and its international counterpart ISO 9706; both define what permanent paper is.

You are unlikely to need the binding standard itself, and knowing it exists changes how you read a supplier's claim that something is library quality. A claim that names a standard can be checked. A claim that only uses the word cannot.

A default that is rarely wrong

Defaults are not answers, and they are much better than guessing under pressure or buying whatever the shop has stocked this month. The wider material property checklist is in choosing materials for book arts, and the record these choices come from is discussed in what the documented record teaches.

Common questions