Handling & Storing Your Collection
Handling and Storing Your Romance Collection
By Rebecca Romney, Type Punch Matrix
September 2025
While the idea may seem counter-intuitive, it’s entirely safe to handle most rare books. Yes, collecting is about preserving books as historical artifacts, but that doesn’t mean you can’t touch those books you’ve carefully acquired and shelved. Books have been engineered over the course of millennia to be used by human hands. Except in the most extreme cases (as when a book is already damaged), following a few simple principles is all it takes to ensure you can handle the books in your collection without anxiety.
This overview focuses on the specifics of post-WWII paperback publishing. The following guidelines, still relevant to any kind of book, are described here with special emphasis on the traits of books that most romance collectors are likely to acquire.
Handling Books In Your Romance Collection
- Handle books with clean, dry hands. No white gloves!
This is best practice according to today’s conservators. (Ignore the movies, as well as the protests of people who conducted research in rare book libraries in the 1980s.) Gloves diminish your tactile sensitivity. It’s more difficult to distinguish between the leaves of a book with your gloved fingertips—have you ever tried to pull out a single bill from your wallet with gloves on? Worse, you’re in much greater danger of letting the book slip and dropping it. Further, the old-school white cotton gloves attract dust and dirt, which you’re then spreading on the books. (Conservators recommend nitrile gloves for items that do require them, like original photographs.)
Follow the procedures of Rare Book School: wash your hands with soap and fully dry them. Then you’re ready to handle books.
- Open the book to a narrow angle.
Many hardcovers can be opened to about a 90 degree angle. For most paperbacks, stick to closer 45 degrees. This is because paperbacks are typically “perfect bound,” in which the text block is glued along its spine, and is attached only there to the outer covers (called “wrappers” in rare book jargon). Opening a book puts strain at the part where the paper is glued to its wrappers. Open it too wide, and the glue may loosen or break. (This is especially true the older the glue is.)
Weakening glue can lead to the wrappers detaching from the text block. It’s often first visible at the beginning and end of the book, between the wrapper and the first/last leaves. It can also appear as cracks anywhere within the book if you look in the “gutter,” the inner margin of the books where the paper meets the spine.
But don’t worry too much about opening the book too wide: just let the book talk to you. When opening it, you will feel when the book adds a bit more resistance. That tension is telling you that you’re beginning to stress the binding. Simply decrease the opening to an angle where you don’t feel that pushback any longer.
Because of their perfect bindings, paperback books also show signs of having been opened across their spines. Remember, the text block is adhered to the spine, so when the leaves are opened to be read, the spine bends in response. This creates the tell-tale “spine crease.”
Modest spine creases are common in this genre. In the case of most 20th-century paperbacks, it would have been difficult to read a book even once without leaving a spine crease. Especially when collecting the books by popular authors—authors who are heavily read—it makes sense that you’re typically going to run into copies that have a spine crease, showing they have been read. The case pictured above is extreme for illustrative purposes, but minor creasing shouldn’t necessarily rule out a copy from “collectible” status.
If I am actually reading a book that I’ve collected—which I do regularly—I use a small trick to help avoid spine creases. Instead of holding the book with the spine resting loosely in the palm of my hand, I gently pinch the front and rear wrappers together near the spine, holding them in place so that the pressure from opening the leaves isn’t able to travel to the spine.
Storing Your Romance Collection
Treat your collection like you treat your guests. Books are very much like humans. They do not like extremes in temperature or humidity; they are damaged by sunlight; they need fresh air. As you’ll see from the guidelines below, the best place to store your collection is in a room you use regularly; a room where guests would be comfortable staying.
- Use Goldilocks conditions.
The room where you store your books should not be too hot or too cold; between 65 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit is practical for most people. If your living conditions don’t allow for that, conservators emphasize that the biggest priority is to avoid extreme fluctuations in temperature: don’t store your books in basements, attics, and garages where those fluctuations are the most likely to occur.
Similarly, the humidity levels ought not to be too low or too high. Too low and the dryness can affect paper quality, making it brittle. Too high and you’re encouraging the growth of mold. If you’re able to measure precisely, a relative humidity of 40% to 55% is best. But don’t worry about being scientifically precise: just remember, books are like humans. Does the room feel uncomfortably dry or humid to you? Then it probably does to the books, too.
- Store books out of direct sunlight.
Just as UV rays damage our skin, they also damage the materials of books. Place books on a shelf that doesn’t receive direct sunlight, and/or add a UV-protecting film to your windows in that room. (These are widely available in a range of prices, beginning around $25.)
How the damage of sunlight affects books will vary according to the materials used in production. Older paperbacks tend to tone—turn brown—where they have been exposed. (Hence the bookseller’s description, “toned spine.”)
Bright colors often fade in sunlight, just as exposure to sunlight fades the pink streaks you added to your hair. American paperbacks from about the 1980s forward tend not only to see their colors fade, but they often fade into a particular aquamarine hue.
A bookseller might describe this as a “faded spine.” Some booksellers will simply call it a “sunned spine.”
- Let books breathe.
Air circulation is good for books. Stagnation creates ideal conditions for pests and for mold, especially in more humid areas. Open shelves are perfectly sufficient in most places. A room with a fan or a dehumidifier may be preferred if you find the room uncomfortably stuffy. (Small dehumidifiers are available these days for less than $50, and those will do the job.)
Do not seal books in plastic bags, like Ziplocs. These plastics degrade over time, and in so doing, they release chemicals that are locked in with your books. Further, if exposed to heat, they can potentially adhere to your books.
- Save repairs for the professionals.
The practice of repairing rare books safely is its own profession: conservation. As specialized knowledge, you may find it too expensive to pay for these services in many cases. Acquire additions to your collection accordingly, or look into the optional storage solutions listed in #5. I highly encourage you not to experiment with repairs on your books without training. If you choose to do so, don’t do any repairs to your books with materials that are not archival. Any materials, like adhesive tapes and pastes, should be clearly described as “archival”: never assume they are.
- Optional: use archival bags, sleeves, and boxes
Some paperback collectors like to put their books in transparent archival bags to protect them from incidental nicks and bumps known as shelfwear. I personally do not recommend them if you like to look at your books frequently, as they are cumbersome to pull books in and out of, and can in fact create nicks and wear in doing so. If you decide to use them, I also do not recommend closing or sealing them: leave the tops of the bags open in the interest of stronger air circulation.
At Type Punch Matrix, we “mylar” our more expensive paperbacks, that is, create custom wraparound sleeves using archival grade polyester (“mylar”).
This is a skill and it takes trial and error to gain a facility, but the steps are fairly simple. If you’re an arts-and-crafts kind of person, it will be particularly easy to learn. Practice first on your non-collectible books in case an attempt goes awry. Once you’re comfortable with the process, you can move on to your collectible ones.
If a book is especially fragile, consider storing it in an archival box. You can order basic paper boxes from archival supply companies in adjustable formats, or with custom measurements (the “clamshell” style works particularly well for paperbacks).
On the higher end, you can also work with professional bookbinders to commission a cloth or leather clamshell box custom for a specific book. These can be very beautiful and look great on a shelf, but note that the price for them tends to start at a few hundred dollars.
Even if you don’t use boxes, be sure to shelve your books perfectly upright, rather than allowing them to tilt over at an angle. Over time this can create what we call a “spine lean” (or, in hardcover books, “cocked”).
That’s it. You’ve spent five minutes reading this list and that’s all it took to learn how to handle and store your collection safely. Don’t let your worries about damaging books be an obstacle to becoming the person who preserves them. It doesn’t take a high-tech rare book facility to be a collector; it only takes a room of one’s own.
Rebecca Romney is the co-founder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare book company based in Washington, DC; and the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize. She is the author of The Romance Novel in English: A Survey in Rare Books, 1769-1999 (a catalogue [free PDF] of the romance collection sold en bloc to the Lilly Library in 2021, where it was recently put on exhibition) and Jane Austen’s Bookshelf. Sign up for her romance-themed rare book newsletter. Text and images copyright Rebecca Romney.