To have a 1926 Sporting News supplement professionally restored, or not?
 

I have a 1926 Sporting News supplement that was tri-folded top to bottom. The paper weakened at one of the folds and has torn along the fold on each side, each tear is about an inch in length. The tears do not enter into the image, impact or effect the image on the supplement in any way. In fact unless you handle the page or examine the page extremely closely with a loop under magnification you would never know the tears are present since they follow the well-defined crease in the paper stock. The paper is the typical brown of a piece of paper that has been aged for 87 years. I have a fear that even with the supplement placed inside a soft page/sleeve protector as I have it, that even simply handling the protector, turning it as a page in a binder, etc. could slightly continue to tear the page inside the sleeve at the extremely brittle fold location.

My question is, should I have the paper professionally restored to repair the tears? Should I leave it alone or maybe attempt to place the supplement and soft sleeve inside a rigid sleeve?

I would leave it alone and think more on which way I would like to handle. The reason I say this is it seems like you are on the fence.

i would not restore, but i would put it in a rigid holder.

Unless its the Ruth (and even then probably not) I don't think it worthwhile to have it professionally restored.

I have a few and just keep them in a photo album.

Agree with Steve

+1 ...the return on investment most likely would not pay off. Get a big top loader, stick it in it very carefully, and be done with it. ON inexpensive paper items I have, a few times but not too often, I have used some archival tape to hold pieces of paper together. I only do it as a last resort but it's basically free and can help a lot with the stabilization of a paper item.