Spent most of last week at the historical society deciding how to rehouse a general store’s account ledger from 1911, cloth spine mostly gone, pages foxed but stable, the kind of object where the actual conservation question isn’t “how do we fix this” so much as “how do we stop it from getting worse without doing something worse ourselves in the process.” I built a custom four-flap enclosure out of acid-free board, cut to the exact dimensions of the book with about a quarter inch of clearance so it doesn’t shift and abrade its own corners every time someone pulls it off the shelf. It took the better part of a day. I went home that evening and spent another hour sleeving four hundred game cards, and somewhere around card two hundred it hit me that I was doing, at a much smaller scale and with much lower stakes, exactly the same job.
This is the thing nobody warns you about when your day job is materials preservation, it colonizes the rest of your brain whether you want it to or not. I cannot look at a game box with a “just toss everything in baggies” storage solution anymore without feeling a small, specific irritation, the same irritation I feel when I find a historical document that’s been stored loose in a drawer for sixty years, touching things it shouldn’t touch, getting bent at a corner nobody noticed until the bend became permanent. A bad insert isn’t just an inconvenience to me the way it seems to be for most people. It’s a long-term storage failure I can see coming from across the room.
The obvious difference, and I do think about this, is that nothing in my game collection actually matters the way a hundred-year-old ledger matters. If a card gets a soft corner from bad storage, I can replace the card, or at absolute worst replace the game, and either way nobody’s lost a piece of a small town’s actual economic history. I try to keep that perspective honest rather than pretend my hobby carries the stakes of my job. But the instinct underneath both is genuinely the same one, an object exists now in a particular condition, and every choice you make about how it’s stored either protects that condition or slowly erodes it, and most people, understandably, don’t think about that erosion until it’s already happened.
What I’ve actually changed, concretely, because of this overlap: I now buy card sleeves in bulk the way I’d order archival folders, I check a new game’s stated component list against what’s actually inside before I ever play it once, the same way I’d check an accession record against a donation, and I have genuinely walked away from buying a beautiful, well-reviewed game because its box had no real insert solution and I could tell, just from photos, that everything in it was going to end up loose and grinding against everything else within a year of ownership.
My partner thinks this is a little much. I think it’s just paying attention to something most people have simply never had a reason to notice, and once you notice it, you cannot go back to not noticing it, the same way you can’t unsee a typo once someone’s pointed it out to you.