I’ve never been much of a printing plate collector, but found myself with a small stack of ‘em while feverishly cracking Breygent Mystery packs. A couple of my plates looked like they had chicken pox or something, as seen in the Marilyn below. Looking all jaundiced and diseased like that no one would want my Marilyn plate, despite it’s rarity. I asked on Non-Sports Card Forum (www.nonsportcardforum.com) if anyone had tried cleaning printing plates before, and after a short time Nicnac spoke with an expert who confirmed they could be cleaned up with alcohol. I started with Marilyn, since basically the spots destroyed any collectible value, I took a good paper towel and some isopropyl alcohol and went to work on Marilyn. After a minute or two I pulled up the paper towel and looked at the transformation:
I was in awe, not only were the spots gone, but the sickly yellow color was coming off too, I cleaned her a bit more to get more yellow off and was thrilled with the final results. So thrilled in fact, that I took alcohol to some other plates in my collection.
Perhaps I was a bit hasty in my cleaning fervor as I quickly found that not all of the plates improved as much as the first Marilyn. Black ink is far more difficult to remove than the yellow ink was. I actually started using what I assume are stronger and stronger solvents trying to clean the plates off, and while the plates are clearly cleaner than they were before you could argue that their appearance may not have been improved with the cleaning.
My advice is simple, if a plate looks really bad — like the first Marilyn clean it up, if it looks good leave it alone. . . Also, the solvents and alcohol described here will eat the finish off of furniture, so if you do clean up some plates make sure you are working on a surface you don’t care about.
I may clean one more plate. . . a yellow Lindsay Lohan plate from Pop Century. . . If you aren’t familiar the plates in Pop Century are signed via sticker autographs, so this presents some issues. First, the solvent would destroy the autograph, 2nd the entire plate won’t be able to be cleaned since I can’t clean under the sticker. I’m not sure what I’m going to do — it’s an expensive experiment.
Happy Collecting!
Jon
Ed from Sci Fi cards just posted up scans of the new True Blood promo from Rittenhouse on Card Talk. While it doesn’t really say anything about the upcoming card set it does offer a coupon code for 20% off True Blood merchandise at store.hbo.com.
