Forum - View topicYellow Manga pages
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ReaKon
 Posts: 127 Location: UK |
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Hi there, I was wondering what the cause of manga pages turning yellow is? I keep all my manga in great condition on a shelf, in a cool dry room with relatively low light. The ones that are about 2 years old are turning yellow on the page edges, especially on the top of the book.
Is there any way to prevent this without having to pack them all away in plastic bags? I quite like how they look on the shelf. |
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Jaymie
Posts: 915 |
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It just naturally happens to paper that is exposed to air. Even if your room is dry, it still happens. Storing your manga properly on shelves just delays the inevitable.
The only solution would be to store them in plastic. But I don't really think it's worth the money or effort. Plastic ensures that the edges stay pretty, but it's not like yellow edges affects the readability of the book. You could also start investing in high quality manga, I guess. Those pages never turn yellow. You can usually tell they're high quality if they're taller and/or wider than normal manga. |
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zawa113
 Posts: 7358 |
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Well, the exposed edges tend to yellow faster, you could get shelves that fit the manga perfectly with no room on the top or bottom.
I do notice that some manga series will yellow and other really won't, for example, Astro Boy is the champion of yellow pages, they pretty much all had yellow edges even when I bought the things. You can tell they're using some sort of different paper because it's a standard about 200 page length but looks about 2/3rds as thick as other manga (and not just because they're smaller volumes, I've lined them up spine to spine). It's really all about what paper it was printed on more than anything. |
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Moomintroll
 Posts: 1600 Location: Nottingham (UK) |
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It's the acid in the paper - exposure to light and air speeds the process up (and damp or high humidity won't do them any favours either) but it will happen eventually, even if you wrap everything in plastic with calcium impregnated backing boards.
Most European and North American graphic novels these days are printed on paper with much lower acid content and don't really suffer too much from the paper going yellow and brittle. Most manga is still printed on pulpy paper with a very high acid content (like floppy comics used to be) - that's one of the reasons manga can be sold so cheaply relative to Western book-length comics. |
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Paploo
Posts: 1875 |
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VIZ's old trades are super-super white, my Maison Ikkoku vols are pristine- part of the trade off of cheaper books was cheaper/lowergrade paper.
Mind you, I have paperback novels with similar paper that are 40+ years old are still quite readable, with some in pretty good contition. A lot of pricier editions still use the better paper of earlier domesitc manga- VIZ's SigIkki line, some of Dark Horse releases, artbooks obviously. Marvel switched to glossy paper in the mid 90's, and their comics from that era really held up. There's a whack of 80's stuff printed on baxter paper that also looks like it was just printed. Since the 90's most comics are printed on non-acidid paper [some manga monthlies held onto that newsprint though]. Bone, Castle Waiting, Love and Rockets Vol II- all had really nice paper that still stands up. But mind you, it all added to the price a little bit- the desire to keep manga prices low since the early 00's is part of why it has cheaper paper [Marvel and DC also have budget priced trades printed on newsprint]. The stuff on newsprint is still readable, and often in pretty good condition. It takes a really, really long time for the entire page to yellow though, with the yellowing mostly just sticking to the edges. So you don't have much to worry about. Just take care of your books and don't be too rough with em, and you'll get a lifetime out of them. |
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ReaKon
Posts: 127 Location: UK |
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Thanks guys, that makes me feel better. Are there any other affects to the paper other than turning yellow? Are the pages likely to start crumbling away?
The majority of my manga collection is SJ so I guess they are the cheaper collections of books. Having said that, I have the series with larger volume counts so I have still invested alot of money in them as a whole. I wouldn't want to find that they are useless in 5 years time. |
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Tamaria
 Posts: 1512 Location: De Achterhoek |
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I own Penguin paperbacks from the sixties that are as yellow as can be, but they're still perfectly readable. They may not be worth much to a collector, but their value to a reader remains unchanged. |
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Paploo
Posts: 1875 |
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http://www.loc.gov/preserv/deterioratebrochure.html Here's an arcticle on the deterioration of papers by the Library of Congress- they bring up a thing libraries do where they send their books to be restored and de-acidified. This makes rare paperbacks last a good long while. But yeah, it'll basically be 50-100 years until those books start to get fragile [though not unreadable], so I wouldn't worry much about them becoming useless in 5 years time. Paperbacks and comics from the 60's are still pretty readable/sturdy even if they're on cheap paper. And as mentioned, non-acidic paper pretty much lasts forever, which is what some higher quality books are printed on, so the manga in your collection in that format'll be around for a good while, haunting used book stores and your heir's bookshelves long well into the 2070's and beyond. |
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vashna
Posts: 1313 |
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I believe though that when it is said that 'light' speeds up the process, it is more a reference to Ultraviolet Light. One of the other major problems with UV is the 'bleaching' that occurs when books are left in it. The manga shelves are right in front of a giant picture window. While hard glass works to block UV, it cannot stop all of it and over time some of the spines of these volumes have become so bleached that one cannot even read the title.
The UV content of certain types of artificial light becomes a problem in museum conditions. I'm glad to hear you keep your manga out of direct sunlight, etc. |
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ReaKon
Posts: 127 Location: UK |
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Well they are only in a dimly lit room because it is a spare room that we use to store things in so we only enter to grab or drop something in occasionally. Because of this the curtains rarely open.
I haven't seen any sign of fading on the spines as of yet, and that would be even worse than the page edges turning yellow for me. Thanks for the heads up on that one though, I will always face my shelves in the opposite direction of the window where possible. Out of interest, how long did it take for your spines to fade? (I assume this has happened to you) |
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vashna
Posts: 1313 |
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I made a serious mistake there; I'm sorry. I meant to say "At my local library, the manga shelves are..." I'm very sorry for the confusion. It should take a while for that to happen I'm sure, but sunlight can always warp things. I'm actually really neurotic in real life, so that wouldn't happen to me for all the wrong reasons.
Again, I'm very sorry for the confusion. If that actually happened to me, I'd probably be devastated. 
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