Pulp Collecting 101: First, do no harm!

How to clean, repair, and preserve your pulp magazine collection.

By Curt Phillips

We’ve all seen them, and maybe you own a few. Pulp magazines that look great — except for the four-inch wide strip of heavy brown paper tape bonded permanently to the spine and much of the cover.

Or how about the pulp that some past owner evidently tried to clean with a wet washcloth decades ago, washing off half the cover ink in the process?

Or the pulp that someone once thought to “preserve” by applying clear Cellophane tape to the spine and all the cover edges? Maybe that seemed like a good idea back in 1935, but in the decades since the tape has turned yellow and brittle, has deeply and permanently stained the cover stock, and has shrunk, thus buckling and maybe tearing the cover.

Sure, it’s obvious now that all these little tricks were a bad idea, but they must have seemed pretty reasonable to the original owners who did those things to their pulps decades ago. That they thought to try these primitive pulp preservation methods at all indicates that at least they were starting to think that those beautiful magazines were worth trying to take care of.

It would be many years before the ravages of time would show that better ideas were needed. Let’s take a look at some common factors affecting pulps and consider some possible solutions.

■ Storage: It’s possible to find pulp magazines even today that are in very good to fine condition; occasionally even in “white paper” condition.

There was a time that I didn’t believe that pulps could be found in “white paper” condition, and then I visited pulp dealer Bob Madle who showed me a set of Clayton Astoundings in exactly that condition.

What makes it possible for 85-year-old pulps to be in such great shape today is primarily the conditions they’ve been stored in and cared for in all the years since they were first bought off the newsstand. First, the original buyer had to read them carefully. No bent pages, no dog ears, no leaving them out in the sun or in the rain, and so forth. They had to be stored away from light, in just the right humidity, flat on (preferably) bare wooden shelves, and free from any other factor that would degrade paper that was never meant to last in the first place. And all of this had to be done with no idea that someday we yet unborn pulp collectors would gather in conventions to buy and trade these magazines at many times their original cover price.

That any pulps survive in such condition today is remarkable, but that some do proves that the quality of care they receive does make a difference. Apparently it makes all the difference. We can’t improve the quality of a pulp magazine that’s been stored poorly for the past several decades, but we can make ourselves aware that with proper care and preparation we all can to a large degree stabilize the pulps we have in our care today, and ensure that the next collector who owns them will thank us for our efforts.

Every pulp magazine I own was once owned by someone else, and sometimes by several people all the way back to whomever bought it fresh off the newsstand. Some are in great shape now, and some could be better. Thinking of this helps keep me motivated to take pulp care seriously.

■ Bugs and critters: Let’s say that you’ve just found a big box of old pulps at a flea market, and using your most casual approach you manage to buy the whole box for a great price. Congratulations! You have just rescued some vintage pulps from “out in the wild” and brought them into the pulp collector community.

Maybe you’ll keep them all for yourself, or maybe you’ll sell or trade them with other collectors. What counts the most is that those particular pulps will no longer be decaying away in some barn or basement.

Now your next task is to do what you can to make sure they don’t decay away in your care. The first thing you want to do is evaluate their condition. You’ll want to handle all “fresh” pulps with some care until you know if the ones at the bottom of the box are going to fall apart as you lift them out.

There may be “pulp flakes” falling away as you handle them. You can minimize this with patience and care. Some covers and spines may be detached, so take care not to make this worse by rough handling. Be careful too when you first separate individual issues in case moisture or previously applied tape has made the covers of multiple issues stick together.

Watch out for bugs of various kinds. If you find some scurrying about as you delve into that box you’ll realize that you should probably have done your first sorting of this batch of pulps outside, and not indoors where the bugs can get to your other books and pulps so easily.

Look at the edges of the magazines for any holes that indicate that bugs have been using your pulp as a nesting ground. You can’t repair the holes, but you can open the pulp and make sure that the bugs and any eggs they’ve deposited are gone.

Another not uncommon problem is mousing. That’s where a rodent has been chewing away some of the cover or inner pages, probably because chewed up pulp paper makes great nesting material. There’s nothing you can do about a pulp that’s already been “moused,” but seeing this in your collection is the best incentive I know to make you buy mouse traps, or even better, to make you bring in a professional exterminator to check out your home.

■ Dirt: After a good general inspection I would start cleaning the pulps. No, don’t reach for that bottle of Windex, reach instead for a clean one-inch to one-and-a-half-inch paintbrush of medium stiffness — and by “clean” I mean one that has never been used for any other purpose.

You can buy these at many discount stores for a dollar or less. Get one and only use it for pulp cleaning. You might as well get a box, or maybe even a small plastic toolbox to keep that brush in. You’ll be collecting a few other tools to use on pulps before you’re done.

Depending on how the pulps had been previously stored they may be covered in dust, dirt, or just grime. If the covers seem dusty, I’d use that brush to gently brush away any loose material. Do this over a trash can, and consider that word “gently” at some length before you start, because your pulps might be a bit fragile and too vigorous brushing can cause a pulp flake tornado if you overdo it.

Then examine the edges, particularly the upper edge which — if the pulp has been stored upright on shelves — probably has picked more dust than other areas. Starting at the spine, brush that top edge just firmly enough to remove the dust. Then check the other two edges and brush as needed. It’s usually not a good idea to try brushing the spine since that area is often the most fragile part of a pulp and may already be fragmented. Inspect and proceed as seems best.

Now open the covers one at a time and brush away any dirt that may be present in the gutters where the covers and pages meet. Again, you don’t need to be too aggressive with this; just brush enough to remove any visible dirt or debris. Avoid over stressing the covers and pages as you turn them. Pulp pages can be fragile, and a wise pulp collector is one who has gentle hands.

■ Tape: Not long ago I found myself diving across a table at a bookshop in New York to stop a bookseller from applying Scotch tape to the torn cover of a pulp that I wanted to buy (and did). I feel safe in writing that pulp collectors in 2017 are pretty universally agreed that applying tape of any kind to a pulp magazine is a bad idea.

Cover tears are one of the more common problems with a vintage pulp magazine and there is disagreement in the pulp community about what to do about them, but the evidence is clear that most tapes have been shown to cause more problems than they cure. Many — possibly most — collectors today prefer to see a pulp with a cover tear preserved exactly as it is, with no repair made at all.

You’ll occasionally see an old pulp with heavy brown paper tape applied liberally to the spine or inner covers. This type of tape was a standard packing tape used in many stores in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I assume that some folks back then applied it to their pulps thinking that it would help preserve them for later re-reading. If there’s a way to remove that paper tape today without damaging the pulp underneath I haven’t found it. (If you know a way, please contact me.)

Older Cellophane tape — which as far as I know isn’t made or sold anymore — was heavily acidic, and acid literally burns the cover stock and sulfite pulp paper that our magazines are made of. When I have a pulp that’s been taped on the spine or cover edges decades ago, I find that the adhesive is dried and decayed and I can often just lift away the tape itself. Unfortunately the acid in the old adhesive is now permanently bonded to the paper, and I don’t know of any inexpensive way to remove that. I’ll remove the tape only if a) it falls off easily at a touch, b) it doesn’t leave behind any sticky residue that will then stick to bags or other magazines, and c) there are no remaining spots of adhesion that will tear the cover stock if I remove it.

Sometimes old Cellophane tape will have contracted with age causing the cover stock to actually buckle. In that case I will attempt to cut the tape in spots to relieve any tension on the cover. For that task I have a pair of very fine surgical scissors, and a clean X-acto knife (available at hobby shops). More tools for your new toolbox.

Great care should always be used in doing any cutting on a pulp magazine. It should only be done in the single case I’ve mentioned above, where the benefit outweighs the potential harm. Plus you should always bear in mind that any pulp that gets splattered with your blood will be of reduced interest to any future pulp collector, so be careful. Maybe someone out there collects blood-covered pulps, but I don’t.

There is, however, a type of acid free archival paper-repair tape on the market, and I have a roll that I have used it to repair tears on pulp covers under certain limited conditions. This tape is available at some hobby shops and looks very thin and flimsy, yet is completely translucent. It’s not cheap, but then I don’t use it on very many pulps. One roll has lasted me for two years and I still have a good bit of it left.

I’ll use this tape only to stabilize large cover tears to prevent them from getting any worse. The best thing about this tape is that it is completely removable and leaves no residue behind. For this reason, I’ve decided that it’s better to use it on pulps that would be too unstable to handle otherwise. Please note that for any pulp you sell or trade that has tape on it (whether you or a previous owner put it there), this information should be pointed out to the person you’re selling to or trading with. Doing so is part of the basic ethics of the pulp-collecting community.

■ Glue: I’m not sure if glue on pulps is hated more than tape by pulp collectors or if it’s the other way around, but the two things are surely near the top of the pantheon of Pulp Defects That We Hate The Most.

Part of the reason for this is that most folks seem to think that all glues are created equal. Tain’t so. For instance, as discussed above, the glue once used in Cellophane tape tends to degrade and even disintegrate with time (as in 50 years or more), while the glue used in that brown paper packing tape that our pioneer ancestors used on their pulps as they drove their wagons across the wide open prairies (probably headed west in search of more pulps) seems to have a death-grip on the very atoms that make up the pulp paper it’s applied to.

Turning to modern glues, the one that most of us are familiar with is commonly called Elmer’s White Glue or Elmer’s School Glue. This is a cheap, white glue used for a vast number of tasks around the home, classroom, office, and farm. If you have a bottle of it around, then as a pulp collector it is your duty to keep it as far away from your pulps as possible.

Consider carrying that bottle of Elmer’s glue outside with gloves or tongs, digging a hole at least 300 yards away from your pulp collection and burying it deep in the Earth. I’d suggest that you then place a large stone over the spot, but I fear that this would only help you find the grave again the next time you had a stray and ill-advised notion to use a little dab of glue to repair a torn spine on a pulp magazine.

As with cover tears, I’m told that many collectors prefer that torn pieces on spines be left unrepaired. Though I can see their point, I tend to disagree with it. Bits of torn spine that jut out at odd directions are very susceptible to being further torn or torn off as the pulp is moved in or out of its polyethylene bag.

For me it’s a question of stabilization. I read my pulps and want them to be as mechanically stable as reasonably possibly, so I do carefully re-glue bits of the spine that have been torn off. I use a white, archival-quality, acid-free glue. There are several brands available at hobby shops and even in the craft section in Wal-Mart. A 4-ounce bottle costs less than $3. Buy one. But if you do any gluing at all, be sure you only use white, archival-quality, acid-free glue. Any other glue has acid in it that will degrade and destroy your pulp. Yes, it’s your pulp and you can do what you want with it. But someday your heirs might sell that pulp to me, and I’ll be really sad if I find that you neglected to follow Curt’s First Law of Pulp Care:

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHALT THOU EVER USE REGULAR ELMER’S GLUE ON A PULP MAGAZINE.

As I said, glue should only be used sparingly when you have to use it at all. Rather than apply glue directly from the bottle (which risks getting too much glue in the area needing to be repaired) I like to squirt a little out onto a piece of scrap paper and apply it with a very fine paintbrush. (Another item for your pulp repair toolbox: several cheap disposable paintbrushes. I hope you’re making a list.) Alternatively, toothpicks also work reasonably well.

You’ll also want a couple of large paperclips with the long wire bent out to use in clearing the glue bottle because, like I invariably do, you might set the bottle down without bothering to close the cap.

Paint the glue on the edges of the torn paper and gently press the fragment back into place. Use your finger if the fragment is large enough and your finger is clean enough, otherwise use proper tools. I have a small collection of handheld surgical clamps called hemostats, but common tweezers work well, too.

I also have a spatula-like instrument about a foot long with small flat blades on each end that I use to gently move small fragments of folded spine paper back into place. Such instruments can sometimes be found as used items in flea markets, or if you’re handy with metalworking you could probably make something useful without too much trouble. Some surplus dental instruments might be useful, too.

Remember that the goal in gluing anything on a pulp is to effect an invisible repair. A finger-wide smear of dried glue on a cover indicates insufficient care in pulp repair, and you probably should have left the defect unrepaired in the first place.

If you’re not sure of your ability or your hand control, get some junk magazines, such as last month’s issue of Farm Journal, inflict some damage to it, and practice repairs on that. It takes a bit of practice to learn that when working with glue, less is usually better.

■ Staples: Nearly all pulp and older digest magazines have one, two, or occasionally three staples. They bind the interior signatures of the magazine together and were applied by a high-speed machine shortly before the covers were glued on. Sometimes the sharp points of the staples didn’t get compressed into the paper properly and as a result they stick out, tear holes in the back covers, and in the front covers of the pulps they’re stacked with.

I check all the pulps in my personal collection and try to check all the pulps that I sell, and when I find a pulp like this I’ll lay it face down on a flat surface, open the back cover and use a rounded metal tool to carefully compress the sharp ends just enough to bend them down into the pulp paper so that I can no longer feel a sharp point. Doing this may save a lot of other pulp covers from unwanted scratches.

■ Pencil and ink marks on covers: These defects are fairly common and usually result from the magazine having been resold through one of the many used-magazine stores that were once as ubiquitous in America as used-paperback shops are today.

In all cases my advice is to leave them alone. If you try to erase a pencil mark, you’ll find that it’s virtually impossible to do without also removing some of the cover illustration along with it,, and you could easily damage the cover stock in the attempt. I write “virtually impossible” instead of impossible only because I am a die-hard optimist and have to assume that somewhere there may be some gifted artist with a hand so steady and an eraser so clean that removing a very small pencil mark without damaging the pulp cover might be possible. I know that I can’t do it, and I doubt that you can either, so why take the risk? Leave that pencil mark be.

Ink from ink pens or a felt-tip marker? Forget about it. It ain’t coming off.

The ink will have bonded with the paper, or the paper will be too fragile to withstand the pressure, or most likely both. Leave that ink mark be.

One rather charming “defect” is the magazine store stamp. You’ll occasionally see the stamp from some long vanished used-magazine store stamped on a pulp cover. I love seeing these as they convey an utterly vital part of the history of pulp magazines in America all by themselves.

There were once hundreds of these small shops all over the country. They were crammed with several thousand pulps (rather than used paperbacks), usually at half of the original cover price. Many of these stores had a store stamp that they’d apply to the magazine covers to remind customers to bring them back and trade them in again. I have one in front of me now, the April 1931 Air Stories that is stamped:

Bristol, Va., happens to be my hometown, and I know exactly where 637 State St. is. McDowell’s is no longer there, but I can stand on the sidewalk and imagine what the place must have been like in the mid-1930s when that magazine was sold there. As far as I know I’m probably the only pulp collector in the world who would want this pulp just because of that stamp, but I do want it, and I wouldn’t trade it away for anything in your collection. (Probably. But what have you got to trade?)

I relate all this just to demonstrate that sometimes what one collector might see as a defect in a pulp can be its biggest selling point to another collector. Besides, you couldn’t get that stamp off without hopelessly damaging the cover anyway. Don’t even try.

■ Bags: The evidence suggests that pulps stored flat on clean wooden shelves (under the proper conditions, such as proper humidity and away from light) without bags do survive longer and better than pulps in bags under the same conditions. I know collectors who use bags and others who don’t, and both report satisfaction with their choices.

I use bags on all my pulps, and in 40 years I’ve not seen any degradation of the magazines. I have seen some of the older bags become cloudy with time, and whenever I see this I change out the bags. My friend Robert Pilk of Mountain Empire Comics in Bristol, Tenn., sells me a lot of bags for my collection and will presumably do so for some time to come because there’s no other way — at least, no low-cost way — of providing physical protection for your pulps than to carefully place them in good quality bags.

I use 2-mil polyethylene bags. They do a reasonably good job of protecting the magazines from the wear and tear of pulling them in and out of the bags. Such bags cost about 7 to 10 cents each depending on where you buy them.

Bags made of Mylar look great, give excellent protection, and will never become cloudy, but they’re more expensive. You can probably see examples of all these options at your local comics shop, or there are companies that sell them online. One of these, Bags Unlimited, has a short video available on its website that compares the various types of bagging options that you may find useful.

Always use a bag that’s big enough for the magazine with enough extra room so that the edges won’t be compressed. If you’re ever tempted to use a bag that you can just barely squeeze the magazine into, don’t. You’ll regret it later. Better not to use a bag at all than to use one that’s too tight.

On the pulps that I bring to offer for sale at PulpFest the bag flaps will be taped down with Scotch tape. When opening those bagged pulps it may be tempting to just raise one part of it and slide the pulp out of the bag with that tape still attached to the bag flap. This is why whenever you ask to see one of my pulps I’ll open the bag for you and you’ll notice that I remove the tape completely.

Once long ago — when I was very young and much more foolish — I did remove a pulp from its bag with the tape still attached. The free end of the tape snagged the cover and ripped an inch-wide piece out of the middle. This was very discouraging and ruined my pulp-collecting day, but it taught me a lesson that I needed to learn. Learn ye, from my sad mistake. Curt’s Second Rule of Pulp Care:

ALWAYS COMPLETELY REMOVE THE TAPE FROM THE BAG FIRST. NO EXCEPTIONS. THIS MEANS YOU — AND ESPECIALLY ME!

Anyone who ever catches me making that same mistake again has my permission to whack me upside the head with a rolled up copy of The Saturday Evening Post. Just please, not an issue with a Ray Bradbury or a Robert A. Heinlein story.

■ ■ ■

This has been a summary of how this collector cleans, repairs, and otherwise cares for the pulps that are only temporarily in my charge, mindful of the fact that someday — if I take my role as a pulp custodian seriously and do a good enough job — some future collector will own them after me.

Remember that in all pulp repairs, the goal is stabilization only. You can’t restore lost years to an old pulp that has been poorly treated, but sometimes with care you can add more years on to the end of its lifespan.