Student Project: Preservation of Manga Part 2

Disclaimer: Because this is my student project, which is required to be online, please seek a professional on preservation of manga. You can read this just for fun and check back for updates on this project.

This project only focuses on preserving the physical manga as is. No discussion of rebinding or digitization will occur. Those are separate issues to deal with.

Manga handling

~Placing manga in a bookshelf or book truck



Since it is made out of acidic material, which is cheaply made, you should carefully place the manga in the shelves without shoving the manga in between other manga or books. If you aggressively put the manga into a bookshelf, it will damage the cover of the manga by bending it or removing of the exterior of it. This handling could also damage the exterior of neighboring manga and books.



You should make a space wide enough to place the manga in the bookshelf. Between manga and books.

~Removing manga from a book shelf or book truck

Even though manga does not have a head cap like hard cover books, you should not aggressively pull the book out. Since manga is already made out of acidic material and cheap glue, just grabbing it out of the book shelve can further damage the exterior of the book such as the coloring of the cover. This could also damage the exterior of neighboring manga or books.





You should push the neighboring books and manga slightly in enough so you can carefully pull out the manga.

~Shelving Manga

Manga should not be placed on the opening side. The weight of the spine will damage the pages of the manga and the pages are not strong enough to hole up the book. You should not place the manga on its spine, because the weight and the open side of the paper glued to the spine can further weaken the spine and possibly the strength of glue.



Manga should be placed in an upright position.

~Viewing manga or opening it



No matter what the reason is for opening the manga, how to view or open the manga is an issue that will probably be difficult to deal with.



Unless you can look at the contents of the manga without completely opening it, you will end up damaging the spine of manga. If you see cracks along the spine of the manga, you know the spine is damage.

Student Project: Preservation of Manga Part 1 Introduction
Student Project: Preservation of Manga Part 3 Storage Area
Student Project: Preservation of Manga Part 4 Protection, Dark Horse Comics Archiving and Thank You's

© 2008 Linda Thai