Other How does one preserve a magazine?

I have some copies of custom pc that I appeared in or wrote in, that I'd like to preserve for prosperity. Anyone have any tips on doing so? Particular bags you use, do I put desiccating pouches in?

Cheers all

 

My old mags (some of which are older than I am) are mostly just on shelves as-is or, since the move, still in boxes. But they're in an office which has a dehumidifier keeping the RH around the 55% mark - it's humidity, more than anything else, that'll do for you. If you don't have a humidity-controlled environment, then keeping them near (but not touching) a chemical dessicant is a decent call.

The other biggie is, of course, sunlight. Surprisingly few books and magazines have their covers printed in UV-safe ink, and they'll fade like billy-o if they're facing a window. Again, something I've avoided in the new place by paying for a film on the windows that blocks 99-point-something percent of UV light - though, sadly, too late for some stuff.

Even if you do everything exactly right, though, paper is not a forever medium. The pages are often bleached and left acidic, which causes degradation over time; likewise the adhesive keeping the pages in. (Older magazines which use a fold-and-staple approach are better for this, but have a different problem: the staples rust over time and leave a stain on the centre spread.)

If you want to preserve the content rather than the physical object, then get yourself a scanner and go nuts. I'm trying to digitise my stack of mags, but it's a slow process - the best quality comes from slicing the spine off with a knife and running the pages through my Fujitsu document scanner, but that's obviously destructive. I've bought a non-destructive book scanner which is basically a webcam on an arm with some laser-based sensor thing that attempts to de-curl the pages, but I've not had time for a proper play - and the results from a brief go while hit with a bout of insomnia weren't promising.

The digital scans I have done are great, though: I run 'em through a script which, as its final step, processes the files into a PDF with an OCR'd text layer, so I've full-text search across everything - and they're DRM-free PDFs, so I can load them onto my Remarkable for comfortable reading.

 

Thanks for the tips. They're currently residing in a filing cabinet lay flat on the base of a draw. I have 2 copies of each, one for show and one for prosperity, so might just keep one in there with a dehumidifier tub thingy.


I think I have the pdf copies of the mags saved somewhere too. Was going to get them printed and framed once I've built the new office, maybe altered to feature the original unedited slightly crass but more interesting grammatical nightmare that was submitted.

 

That's easily stopped with a sock

 

Noice.

There was a rumour at school someone used a snickers wrapper. This was post change to plastic, the paper ones would never have withstood it.