Framing works on paper without ruining them

Framing looks like a decorating decision and is actually a conservation one. A drawing in the wrong frame will yellow, ripple, stick to its own glass and acquire a permanent brown line where it touched the mount. All of that is preventable, and none of it is expensive if you decide correctly the first time.

1. Everything touching the work must be acid-free

Ordinary mount board is wood pulp, and wood pulp is acidic. Over a decade or two it burns a visible brown line into the paper exactly where the bevel sat — the single most common damage a framer causes. Ask for conservation or museum-grade board, which is either cotton rag or purified and buffered pulp. The cost difference on a single frame is small; the difference in twenty years is total.

The same applies to the backing board behind the work. Corrugated cardboard is the usual offender and will print its own flutes onto the back of the paper.

2. The work must be hinged, not stuck

Paper expands and contracts with humidity all year. It has to be able to move, which means it should hang from two small hinges along its top edge and nothing else. Traditional hinges are Japanese tissue and wheat starch paste — both fully reversible, both removable with water by a conservator.

What must never be used: pressure-sensitive tape of any kind, spray adhesive, and dry mounting. Dry mounting is permanent, it is not reversible, and it removes essentially all resale and conservation value from a work on paper. If a framer suggests it for anything other than a poster, find another framer.

3. Nothing should touch the glazing

A mount does this automatically by holding the paper a few millimetres back. If you are framing without a mount, ask for spacers round the inside edge. Paper pressed against glass in a humid room will eventually bond to it, and the only way back is a conservator and a great deal of money.

4. Choose the glazing deliberately

• Standard glass — cheap, heavy, breakable, no UV protection. Fine for something you are not attached to.

• UV-filtering acrylic — light, safe to ship, blocks most of what fades pigment. The default for anything valuable.

• Museum glass — UV filtering plus anti-reflective coating. Expensive, and startling the first time you see it, because it effectively disappears.

• Avoid non-glare etched glass — it diffuses the surface and makes everything look slightly soft and dusty.

Ask one question: "is everything touching the work reversible?" A good framer will answer immediately.

Sealing the back

A dust seal — tape run round the join between backing board and frame — keeps out insects, dirt and most humidity swings. It is a two-minute job that framers sometimes skip. Ask for it, and ask them to leave a note inside with the date and the materials used, so the next person to open it knows what they are dealing with.

Float mounting, and when to use it

A float mount hangs the sheet on hinges in front of the backing rather than under a window mount, leaving the deckle or the cut edge visible. It is the right choice when the paper’s edge is part of the work — handmade paper, a torn deckle, a print with a visible plate mark. It needs spacers, because there is no mount holding the sheet off the glass, and it needs a framer who has done it before: the hinges take all the weight with nothing hiding them.

Frame material, briefly

• Hardwood — stable, heavy, and the default for anything valuable. Seal the rebate if it is raw.

• Softwood — cheap and prone to warping across large spans, and its resins can off-gas into a sealed frame.

• Aluminium — inert, light, and the safest choice by a distance for anything going into a humid room.

The rebate is the part nobody checks

The rebate is the lip the glazing and backing sit in, and on a cheap frame it is raw wood in direct contact with the edge of your mount board. Over years, acid migrates out of it and into the board and then the paper. A strip of aluminium barrier tape round the rebate costs almost nothing and stops it entirely — ask for it by name.

When to reframe something old

1. The mount has browned, especially in a line at the bevel. That is acid burn and it is still happening.

2. The paper is rippling. Usually humidity plus a mount that is holding the sheet too tightly.

3. Tape is visible at the corners. Pressure-sensitive tape stains and eventually fails, and the stain is far harder to remove than the tape.

4. The backing is cardboard. Replace it, whatever else you do.

A conservator, not a framer, should handle anything already stained or stuck down. Framers frame; removing old adhesive from paper is a different trade.

Everything you spend on conservation framing you spend once. Everything you save on it you pay for twice.