Issue 04 · Keeping It · Brochures & Manuals

Collecting Paper Without Buying Rubbish

Motoring print is one of the last genuinely cheap collecting fields, which means most of what is offered is worth what it costs, which is nothing.

Decide whether you are collecting or decorating

These are different activities with different rules and almost all the bad purchases come from confusing them. If the object is going on a wall, condition of the reverse does not matter, provenance does not matter and a good reproduction is a perfectly rational buy.

If it is going in a box because it is a record of something, then originality, completeness and condition are everything and a reproduction is worthless. Both positions are legitimate. Holding both at once is how people spend three hundred pounds on something they then frame and fade.

The four condition faults that cannot be fixed

Cockling, where coated paper has absorbed moisture and rippled. It will not press out and it never improves.

Foxing, the brown speckling caused by fungal activity and iron impurities in the paper. It can be reduced by a conservator at a cost that exceeds the value of almost all motoring print.

Fading, especially of reds and yellows, which is caused by light and is cumulative and permanent. A poster that has hung in a sunny room for twenty years has lost colours that no longer exist in it.

And tape. Any pressure-sensitive tape applied to paper will, over decades, migrate adhesive into the fibres and leave a permanent brown stain that is larger than the tape was. Sellotape repairs are worse than the tears they fixed.

Where the value actually sits

Rarity in this field is rarely about print run. It is about survival, and survival is about format. Anything folded survives badly. Anything given out at a motor show survives badly because it went in a bag with everything else. Anything hardback survives well.

The consequence is that a common car can have a rare brochure and a rare car can have a common one. Specialist dealers price on the car; generalist sellers price on how nice it looks. The gap between those two is where anything interesting gets bought.

Completeness matters more than most buyers expect. A brochure with its original price list and specification insert is worth substantially more than the same brochure without, and the inserts are exactly what gets thrown away.

Storing it so it survives you

Flat, dark, dry and cool, in that order of importance. Acid-free folders for anything you care about, polyester sleeves rather than PVC, and never store anything against untreated wood or cardboard, both of which are acidic.

Do not laminate anything, ever, and do not dry-mount a poster you might sell. Both are irreversible and both destroy the value of the object even when they improve how it looks.

For anything framed, ultraviolet-filtering glazing and a mount that keeps the paper off the glass. The mount is not decorative; paper touching glass in a room with any humidity will eventually stick to it.

Duncan Ashby, May 2026

Next piece: The Motoring Annual as a Genre