Poster Mountain

We don't often suggest (metaphorically) taking a work of art down to the studs, or in this case down to the substrate, but this 1904 Colorado Midland Railway advertisement was an exception. This post focuses on the preparation and stabilization of a very unusual project. Work after our gelatin process and temporarily mounted to a board.  While it might appear that the majority of this advertisement is intact, huge sections of the paper were completely rotten. You can see in the images below where the mold that was eating the paper is visible. Essentially, the majority of the black background was slowly flaking off. The white area is where the mold had eaten away at the ink and if you touched it the top layer of paper would flake off. Another example of an area where the paper was rotting away can be seen below. Almost all of the area above the figure is disintegrating due to the water damage.  In this area, not only was the top layer beginning to fall off, b

I got lucky for this post since the title of the movie for this poster is also the perfect title for a Halloween week blog post: A-Haunting We Will Go from the great duo of Laurel and Hardy. This week's post is also fun because we do a little Poster Mountain retcon. (Yes, I know this is usually used in fictional tv, but I'm using it in the way that we decided to retroactively fix something after the poster had been linen backed. So there.) Linen Backed Laurel and Hardy A-Haunting We Will Go When we received this piece it was mounted to craft paper, which we had to demount it from before linen backing it.  The client opted for full restoration and when I measured the poster, I realized that we were missing paper on the top, bottom and one of the side borders. What wasn't very obvious when the poster was first linen backed was that three of the four borders had been badly trimmed. We knew that we were probably going to have to add borders back, but it is easi

Since Fall is quickly approaching, but I'm not quite ready to let go of Summer I thought we'd do a very summery post. This large scale vintage advertisement measured about 5 1/2 by 2 1/2 feet and had been stored folded for a number of years. All of the edges had been folded back probably because when it was displayed in the early-mid-20th century it was wrapped around a piece of metal. (Side note, if you want to go down the history rabbit hole, there is a fascinating story about the legal battle between Good Humor and Popsicle which you can read here: The Cold War Between Good Humor and Popsicle. ) We began, as we usually do, by washing the piece. We have large melamine boards for larger scale objects like this and have learned that it's easier to put these boards on our conservation tables and work directly on top of them. The light and angle in this photo give a good idea of the two fold lines and if you look closely you can see the edges that were are at thi

This is the final post in our longest running blog project. I intended to finish months ago, and then the computer and I got into a fight. I lost patience and am only now returning to finish off telling you about this incredible project! Since we have been chronicling the conservation and restoration of this 1927 silent movie poster for more than two years, I want to give you a brief overview of where we started and how far we've come before I reveal the end result. This poster literally started in pieces. Our first two blog posts give a complete description of what we went through to put it back together: Episode 1 and Episode 2 .  Back to the very beginning...  Figuring out what we actually had to work with and realizing we were missing the entire middle.  After a whole lot of work, the poster was finally linen backed and restoration began. Our proud fearless leader!    Episode 3 goes into more depth about the process that Ravi went through to find a r