Storing Your Collection

Storing your collection is a task, especially if you are storing it with an eye to conserving your pieces so they don't melt into a puddle of Vinegar in a few years.  There are some wrong ways to do storage but there are a lot of right ways to do storage.  

Things to NOT do:

- Do not put pressure on the paint if at all possible

- Do not let the paint touch any fibrous surfaces like PAPER, acrylic paint likes to stick to these things and removing stuck paper can damage your cel.

- If you have unstuck layers, PLEASE keep them separate there is nothing worse than finding a piece where the cel layers have gotten stuck in a mismatched fashion.

- Keep your collection at a stable temperature and humidity, if at all possible, my house typically is 72 Degrees year round with an average of about 50% humidity (since I started tracking this)  It's not as good as say the Disney vault but stability is important.  Sudden fluctuations can cause mold to grow and paint and plastic to crack.

- Keep your collection in the dark as much as possible especially if you have pieces from Toei Studios, Toei had some of the cheapest production values of all the anime studios and their lines have no stability and in my experience fade even with proper storage.

Good Practices/Recommendations:

- Store each cel in a polypropylene bag, I use the BCW Treasury Comic Bags for standard sized cels, they are fairly cheap, easy to get and when you need to do a bag change it is not prohibitively expensive to do your entire collection

- Leave one side of the bag open to the air, and on the opposite side trim a small corner off the bag to promote airflow, you do want air flow, you do NOT want your cel to as I call it stew in it's own juices, this can make the deterioration of your piece move much faster.

- Put a zeolytic trap (like Microchamber paper), in each bag NOT against the paint, as it will stick, to help catch the gases that do not dissipate with airflow.  

- For storage I recommend using the Itoya Binders (See article in the preservation section about binders vs. folios), no more than 24 cels per Binder, anymore causes the Binder to lose pages when you hang it (see next recommendation), also cels are heavy and the more you put in the book the heavier it is.

- For the binders it is possible to store vertically in a bookcase without putting undue pressure on the paint, however, I prefer to hang them in  a closet with a blanket hanger it causes less pressure overall against the paint, and allows for better airflow.