The past few weeks have been so busy, I'm afraid I've been neglecting the blog! When things finally slow down a little bit I'm sure we will have plenty of interesting projects to discuss. This post is going to be a short elaboration on some basic do-it-yourself conservation tips John recently talked about on our Facebook page. Our example, a contemporary silkscreen by Martin Ansin for the 1927 classic Metropolis. The back, or verso of the poster has a lot of old framers' hinging tape. Whoever framed this really overdid it because it was applied to all four sides. This particular tape is a pressure-sensitive type of adhesive tape. Someone else had previously attempted to peel it off and as you can see in the photo they started to skin the back of the poster. Thankfully they stopped and left the removal to us. Here I carefully apply Bestine , a solvent normally used for thinning rubber cement, available at most art supply stores .