I’ve got some old LPs, from the 1960s, and I’ve bought some replacements for the old paper envelopes they came in, but now a lot of the cardboard covers (the pretty ones, with pictures of the artists on the fronts and sometimes lyrics or song lists on the back) are in pretty bad shape.
I’ve got all sorts of glue, tape, and other adhesive material, but I wonder what I can do that’s a) easy b) aesthetically pleasing and c) long-lasting. This is not for re-sale so it doesn’t have to be perfect, just so I can handle the old LPs without making a bad situation worse.
Thanks. At a glance, that looks as if it might work better with books that open fully–my albums need to be repaired without opening at all. But maybe I’m misunderstanding the process.
[Moderating]
Especially since one of your major criteria is aesthetics, I think this will fare better in Cafe Society than in Factual Questions. Moving.
No help to the OP, but I learned, during a tour of the EMI factory, that the sleeves were much more expensive to make than the vinyl records.
Sleeves were often complicated, with a lot of colours (in those days, each colour meant a separate pass through the printer) and often with foil added. EMI stored the records (in the plain sleeve) and the printed sleeves separately, only putting them together when it was dispatched to a shop. For a new band, they might print a thousand records, but only a few hundred sleeves. The records could be recycled if not sold, but the sleeves just went to landfill.
Classical music was the bread and butter of the business. No composer royalties to pay and relatively plain sleeves for a product that never went out of fashion.
Outer sleeves shouldn’t be snug because they can warp the record. I used to use sleeves that left about 1/4" on all sides. The ones listed here are at least 12.75" Amazon.com : valuable record protectors
For the inner sleeve, you want something with antistatic plastic.
