Newspaper Restoration

The restoration of old and damaged newspaper material

People often cut-out newspaper articles that relate to members of their family in some way. These cuttings are kept as mementos alongside family photographs and other memorabilia. These newspaper cuttings are often folded and placed in an envelope for long term storage, but newspaper is only intended to last for a day; it is not the best quality paper and is thus susceptible to tears and discolouration in a very short time.

Like a treasured photograph, a newspaper article can represent the sole surviving record of an event that can mean a great deal to a family. The need to preserve these records is becoming more prevalent as the popularity of family history grows.

(A particularly virulent strain of this activity has taken hold among suburbanites vying to outdo one another by dislodging past luminaries from their family trees).

The popularity of family history has grown commensurably with that of the internet.
History is simply a record of the past, but only a finite amount of information can be recorded; naturally, due to this limitation, such records relate predominantly to the most notorious members of society.
Now though, the internet can provide us with an abundance of information that relates to the lives of the most prosaic of individuals - past and present. History is becoming a much more personal subject as people are discovering that their own family's exploits are much more interesting to them than those of bygone politicians, kings, generals and emperors.

This article came in three pieces with only minor edge fraying. Nearly all of the text was intelligible and the few words that weren't could be easily reconstituted from the context of the sentences and the general tone and syntax of the article. Each piece was scanned separately then joined together in photoshop. As the print was still in good condition there was no need to retype any of the text. Where the tears cut though the words, letters were cloned from elsewhere in the article. The size of the piece means that much of the alphabet is available for cloning in both uppercase and lowercase.
It is best to maintain the colour of the aged paper otherwise the restored version would look more like a freshly typed copy and you would have removed the characteristics that define its place in the past; comparable to removing the wrinkles from somebody's face without being asked to do so.