Having started buying your collection, cleaned and restored or not, where do you go next? This is not as easy as it sounds and there are two key considerations. The primary aim is to protect things over a long period of time. The secondary goal is to be able to see your collection without disturbing or damaging it. Disturbance usually equals damage over time. Those wonderful sturdy brown boxes offer good protection but you are probably damaging both every time you take that set out of the box to look at it. You will probably want to keep all the bits intact inside the set box but there are risks. Personally I keep all sets together minus the keeper wires. Too many people are creating sets by adding bits purchased at different times and we are in danger of losing sight of what comprises each genuine set. A strip of plain card will help keep the players flat but keep the box out of the light or it will fade.

So where do you keep all the smaller pieces, the players and so on?
There are hobbies that for many years have stored delicate items and these are always a good place to start. Two immediately spring to my mind, namely card and stamp collecting. Both have evolved excellent archiving systems but what you will need depends on the nature of your collection.


A team pack

One word of warning here: these items work for me but I am offering no guarantee as to the long term effects. Please ensure that anything you allow in to long term contact with your collection, say the surface of a player, is designed and manufactured as archive quality. Some clear plastics are acidic which may not matter in the short term but they are not suitable for archiving. I leave everything open for many months before use to let it 'breathe'.

For teams out of base I use a triple protection pack that I developed out of much trial and error. The first item is a stamp mount. Don't panic if stamp hinges spring to mind, they went out decades ago. The modern hingeless mount consists of a black back piece coated with adhesive and a clear front cover so you can still see the player I stick the mounts on black card guillotined to the required size. Once again keep a supply of cards made as you wet the adhesive to stick it to the card so they need some days to dry out flat under a cd cover or five.

I then use two items familiar to card collectors, the flimsy and the top loader. Your team is mounted on three cards (4+4+3). Each card goes in to a flimsy, a thin plastic cover to prevent the mounts flopping open. The flimsy is then inserted in to the top loader, a hard flat acrylic case. If you alternate the openings this forms a pretty much aiir-tight unit but one that you can see through and open if necessary. I keep these in a dark cardex type box with an empty top loader front and back of each stack to absorb knocks and pressure.



Archiving teams in base is not so simple as you still want to see them but protect them and securing the whole team is difficult. I have opted for small acrylic boxes, once again intended to store cards but this time in card sets. The boxes are two piece so they open easily if required and also stack in boxes.



For card strips there are all manner of stamp pages available where individual strips can be stored several to a page.



As for the future we have some way to go before proper classifications of types are established let alone a classification standard body offering sealing and quality certification: one day maybe.