Poster Mountain

This week we are chronicling what might be a standard conservation project, except that the client had an unusual request. He wanted the poster cleaned, but didn't want to linen or paper back it, instead after the poster was washed he wanted us to refold it. The poster is a 1954 "Them" one sheet.   The poster came in with tape stains in the corners and a pretty visible stain right in the middle. The first step was relatively straight forward. John used an organic solution called Orvus to remove as much of the build up as possible from the poster. He sprayed front and back with the solution, then rinsed both sides. The water that John squeegeed out was pretty grimy. Since this poster was not being mounted, and would not go through prep, John had to make doubly sure that there were no creases and that the fold lines were laying flat while the poster was wet. Pictured: John spraying the poster with Orvus. Pictured: Because we were not doing any restoration o

When we left off last week we were trying to decide between taking the tissue off of the back of the poster and trying to mount it with the tissue on. After seeing how the poster and the restoration responded to getting wet we decided to put a facing on the poster using the isinglass process. This meant that we could save as much of the previous restoration as possible and then remove the tissue from the back of the poster without damaging it. This also meant that while the poster was in the interim step between having the tissue removed and being remounted, the hollytex used for the facing would help support the weaker areas of the poster. So, we took the poster back to the mounting table to put the facing on it. John started out as he usually does by rinsing and squeegeeing the poster. The areas that had the most amount of restoration were the black and the red and those were the areas that we were most concerned about, but when John squeegeed the excess water out there was not any