The Framers Forum

A client has brought in a poster for re-framing. It has no mount and the thin paper has stuck to the glass in one corner. About 2" x 2"

Worst case scenario the client is OK to crop the poster if it gets damaged removing it, but what techniques have people used to successfully unstick a thin printed poster from glass?

Thanks.

It's more or less impossible to do without damaging the item in some way.

With a thin poster and such a large area being stuck, safely removing the poster from the glass, is going to be a really serious problem, even for many paper conservators. Some photo labs will photograph the whole item through the glass and retouch the image to make it look acceptable, but don't expect it to be cheap. To be realistic problems like this rarely are easy to fully solve and it's unsually a case of some degree of compromise involved in the best that you can do.

Take a pic of it, to show to anyone who ever asks what mounts are for!

I re-framed a poster for a mate a while ago, and it had been glued (carpet glue?) to hardboard. All I could do was cut a mount exactly the same size as the bleached out one it came with, and put it in a nicer frame.

Anyway, good luck with this one.

You could try lighter fluid, but I wouldn't hold out much hope

OK - not to worry - I think I had successfully lowered the customers expectations sufficiently whilst we were looking at the job.

Thanks for the input.

Seeing as the customer is prepared for part of the poster to be cropped, you've nothing to lose by experimenting. I might be tempted to try slightly dampening the paper very carefully with a very fine artist's brush to see if that would loosen the fibres sufficiently to peel it away without tearing. You can always stop if it looks as if it might tear, so the worst that could happen is that it wouldn't work.

The implication is that the poster is not valuable (if the customer agrees to cutting). Worth checking because you don't want him/her coming back saying you didn't warn him/her about loss of value - get a written disclaimer.

There is a really big problem removing posters from glass. Namely that the printing ink adherses more strongly to the glass than the paper that it is printed. Also that where the ink has stuck to the glass, that it forms a waterproof barrier to all your attempts to get any moistening through to the glass in that area. This is where paper conservators, like myself start doing the really difficult stuff and to be honest the difficult stuff does involvve a significant lvel of risk and you do need some particular equipment to do this.