Soaking 101

[marvymelvin]

I have been reading posts about soaking and practicing on low value cards etc. Well, about 3 years ago I bought a photo album containing over 1000 tobacco cards, sadly not baseball but rather birds, trains, cars, flowers etc. There were 50 or so actors and actresses as well. The cards were all glued onto the album pages, and luckily it was with the good old water based glue that was very common back then.

The pages of the book were black, the kind of soft black paper that I see on most of the cards that have chunks on the back. Anyway, it bothered me to have them all glued so I began to experiment. In that I successfully cleaned glue and paper off of over 1000 cards, I consider myself somewhat of an expert. Add this to my list of useless talents.

Most of the posts here on net54 use the the term "soak" which I assume means to immerse the entire card into water and let it soak for a specified amount of time, after which the unwanted piece of paper will slide right off. Then you wipe it clean and let it dry. I used this exact method about 200 times.

A few observations were that the cards changed patina significantly. They also curled up/warped etc. if I didn't press them into a book or something. Pressing in a book can also cause trouble, as some of the cards stuck to the pages resulting in loss of color/image on the front. In order to remedy this I would blot dry the card on both sides using a towel until it was as dry as I could make it then I would press the card in between two books (minus the dust jacket) as the hard canvas like cover of a book would tend not to stick to the card. If you do not press the card somehow it will almost always curl up and warp.

But alas, we still have the problem of the cards shrinking slightly, and losing the original patina. They definitely do look "different" than cards that were not soaked. So I perfected a method that removed the unwanted paper but did not change the patina and did not result in shrinking or warping.

Materials needed:
eye dropper
tweezers
cup or bowl of water
hand towel
two books
small sponge on the end of a stick (sponge "brush" for painting or varnish application)
Ty Cobb T206 with black album paper stuck to the back


Using an eye dropper, drop water directly onto the left over black album paper. I would drop a few drops and watch the paper soak it in, then I would continue adding a few at a time to keep the unwanted paper hydrated. Try to keep the water from flowing over onto the card back itself. You will have a bit of water flow over the edges of the paper chunk, but nowhere near as much as if you were to soak it entirely over night.

This way you can maintain the original patina and not affect the card so much. It is not as easy as dunking it in water and then going back to it the next day, and all of the unwanted paper and glue is floating in the water. But it is worth the effort especially for cards of greater value. Sometimes it took about 30 minutes of soaking just the unwanted paper, before it would begin to come off. For bigger pieces of paper, I sometimes had to water it, use tweezers to slowly pick off loose parts, then water it again and pick a bit more. Eventually the whole remaining piece would slip right off. Then I used a wet/damp cloth or wet sponge painting brush to wipe the back as clean of glue as possible. I know this is a bit of work, but I just wasn't happy with the tone and patina of the card fronts once they had been immersed and soaked in water for a time.

I am open to additional ideas or questions you might have on problems that you have faced. After doing 1000 cards I pretty much faced everything. Oh and one more thing, even though most cards from this era were glued using water based glue, I still faced some that were not water soluble. For glue that is not water soluble, there is very little that can be done.

More difficult/advanced problems I faced include taking the card out of the book or off of the page without damaging it, and separating two cards that are glued back to back. Add comments or questions here, or send me a message.