Collector’s guide
Almost everything in this archive was printed on paper that was never meant to last. Magazine stock from the 1990s is acidic, the inks fade, and most of these pages survived only because somebody tore one out and forgot about it. What follows is the practical side: how to handle these things so they outlive you.
Removing ads from magazines
Before anything else: decide whether to take it out at all. A complete magazine carries its own date, its page numbers and the ads that ran alongside — context you lose the moment the page leaves the spine. If the issue is common and you only want the ad, go ahead. If the issue is scarce, think twice.
How you do it depends entirely on how the magazine is held together, so work that out first. Open it to the middle. If you see staples in the fold, it is saddle-stitched. If the middle is a glued edge with no staples anywhere, it is perfect bound. The two need completely different handling.
Saddle-stitched: staples in the fold
This is the easy one, and the only method that gets a page out with no cutting at all.
Open the magazine flat to the centerfold, face down on a clean surface, so you are looking at the inside of the staples. Slide something thin and blunt under each folded prong — a bone folder, a butter knife, the flat end of a staple remover — and lift the prongs straight up until they are vertical. Do not twist and do not yank. Turn the magazine over and push the staple out from the front, or lift it away with your fingers.
With the staples out, the whole magazine falls into nested folded sheets. Your ad is on one of them. Lift that sheet out whole.
The thing nobody tells you: every leaf in a saddle-stitched magazine is physically joined to another leaf somewhere else in the issue. Your page and its partner are two halves of one folded sheet. If your ad is on page 34, its partner might be page 91. You cannot separate them without cutting the fold, and cutting the fold gives you two trimmed pages instead of one intact sheet. Most collectors keep the sheet whole.
If the ad runs across the centerfold you have the best case of all: a single flat sheet, no fold through the image, nothing attached to it.
If you are keeping the magazine, push the staples back through the original holes and fold the prongs down. Do not make new holes.
Perfect bound: a glued spine
Thicker magazines have their pages glued into a flat spine. There is no mechanical way to release a single page, and the glue is stronger than the paper, so anything you tear will tear through the sheet rather than the adhesive.
Cutting is the only reliable method. Lay the magazine open and flat, put a metal ruler along the line you want, and draw a fresh blade along the ruler in several light passes rather than one hard one. Cut as close to the spine as you can so the page keeps its full width. A self-healing mat underneath protects both the blade and the table.
Use a metal ruler, never plastic — a blade will shave a plastic edge and wander. Use a new blade; a dull one drags and tears. Never cut freehand and never use scissors, which crush the fibres along the cut.
Some people warm the spine with a hairdryer to soften the hot-melt glue and peel pages away. It does work, but heat is hard on old paper and ink, and it can leave a wavy edge. If the ad matters to you, cut it.
Glue, tape and residue
Old adhesive on a page is best left alone. Solvents lift ink as readily as glue, and water cockles paper permanently. If a previous owner taped something, leave the tape where it is; it has already done its damage, and pulling it off will take the printed surface with it.
Dried glue along a trimmed spine edge can usually be eased off with a fingernail or the edge of a bone folder once it is brittle. Work slowly, work dry, and stop if the paper starts to lift.
What to do the moment it is out
Put it flat straight away, and if it has been curled in a bound magazine, leave it under a sheet of clean board with light even weight for a day or two. Do not press a fold you cannot flatten — that cracks the ink along the crease.
Then sleeve it, back it with acid-free board, and note the issue and date somewhere before you forget which magazine it came out of. That information is the one thing you cannot recover later, and it is the first thing everyone loses.
Sleeves and plastics
Never put paper in PVC. Soft vinyl sleeves feel nice and they will destroy your collection. The plasticizer that makes vinyl flexible slowly leaches out, turns yellow, and bonds to the ink. Given enough years the page and the sleeve become one object and the ad is gone.
Safe plastics are polypropylene, polyethylene and polyester. Polyester is sold under the trade names Mylar and Melinex and is the most inert of the three. If a sleeve does not say which plastic it is, assume the worst.
Storage
Flat, always. Do not fold and do not roll a magazine page. If a piece arrives folded, leave the fold alone rather than trying to flatten it under weight, which can crack the ink along the crease.
Give every page a rigid backing. A sleeve alone lets the paper flex every time you handle it. Acid-free buffered board behind the page stops that.
Cool, dark and steady beats cool and dark. Swings in temperature and humidity do more damage than a consistently imperfect room. Aim for stable conditions somewhere around forty to fifty percent relative humidity. Above sixty-five percent you risk mold; very dry air makes paper brittle.
Not the attic, not the basement, not the garage. These are where collections die — heat, damp, and pests in one place.
Store upright in a box, or flat in a drawer. Stacked piles press the bottom pages and make you shuffle through the whole stack to find anything.
Light
Fading is permanent and it is the damage people notice last. Magenta and yellow inks go first, which is why old ads drift toward blue-green. Ultraviolet does the most harm but ordinary room light fades paper too, just more slowly.
If you want to display something, display a print of a scan and keep the original in the dark. That is not a compromise — it is what museums do.
What damages ads
Tape. Never any tape, on the front or the back, including tape sold as archival. Adhesive stains paper and the stain spreads outward for decades.
Trimming. Cutting a page down to the image destroys both value and evidence. The margins carry the page number, the publication's printing marks, and sometimes the issue date.
Lamination. Permanent, irreversible, and it ruins the piece.
Repairing tears. Leave them. A torn original is worth more than one somebody glued.
Bare hands on the image. Skin oils transfer. Hold pages by the edges.
How to date an ad
If you are holding a milk mustache page with no date on it, the printed tagline will get you closest, faster than anything else on the page. The campaign changed its line three times, and each change is a hard boundary.
| Printed line | When it ran | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| MILK. What a Surprise! | 1994–95 | The earliest work. Rare, and the shortest-lived line of the four. |
| MILK. Where’s your mustache? | 1995–98 | The middle period. Overlaps with got milk? for several years. |
| got milk? | 1995–2014 | MilkPEP licensed the line in 1995 and used it for the rest of the run. On its own it only tells you the ad is 1995 or later. |
| Milk. It Does a Body Good | 1997 | A single year. If you see this line, you have dated the ad exactly. |
Then use the contact details. Early ads carry the freephone number 1-800-WHY-MILK. Later ones carry the website whymilk.com instead. Some carry both, which places them in the changeover. Some carry neither. That progression narrows a got milk? ad considerably, since got milk? alone spans nineteen years.
Then look at who is in it. A celebrity dates an ad almost as tightly as a tagline does, because most appeared at one specific moment in their career. Search this archive for the name and compare.
Then check the back. The reverse of the page may carry an issue date, a subscriber address label, or another ad you can date. This is the single most reliable evidence there is and most people never turn the page over.
Telling two printings apart
The same photograph often ran more than once, with different copy, in different sizes, with and without the subject’s name. Those are separate pieces. Check the caption length, whether the name appears, whether there is a phone number or a web address, and the physical size. This archive groups them as versions of one ad and lists the difference on each.
And the test that only works on this campaign: every mustache was drunk, not painted, so no two are shaped alike. If two scans claim to be the same ad but the mustaches differ, one of them is a different printing.
Checking condition
Is it the whole page? Full pages hold their value. Trimmed images do not, and they are much harder to identify later.
What is on the back? The reverse often carries the publication name, the issue date, or a subscriber address label — which can date a piece exactly. Ask for a photo of the back. Sellers rarely offer one.
Staple holes are good news. They prove the page came out of a bound magazine rather than being a modern reprint.
Watch for reprints. Modern reproductions turn up constantly. Real period pages show halftone dot patterns under magnification, slight show-through from the reverse, and paper that has toned with age.
Beware the word "original" alone. It is used to mean an original printing and also to mean an original reproduction. Ask which.
Campaign-specific traps
The tagline dates the ad. MILK. What a Surprise! came first, MILK. Where's your mustache? followed, and got milk? came last and ran longest. The line printed on the page is the most reliable way to date a piece and to tell two versions apart.
The same photo ran more than once. Many portraits were reprinted with different copy, with and without the subject's name, in different sizes. Those are separate pieces, not duplicates. This archive groups them as versions of one ad for exactly that reason.
Super Bowl ads come in pairs. A pre-game ad with two players, then a solo ad for the winner afterward. Owning one is not owning the set.
Sidebar and two-page pieces get separated. Third-page sidebar ads ran facing the celebrity pages and were never sold separately at the time. Sellers often split a spread. Keep spreads together.
The mustache itself is evidence. Every mustache in the campaign was drunk, not painted, so no two are shaped alike. If two scans claim to be the same ad and the mustaches differ, one of them is a different printing.
Newspaper pieces need different handling. Newsprint is far more acidic than magazine stock and yellows fast. Keep it isolated from other paper, since acid migrates between sheets in contact.
Scanning
A good scan is the best insurance you have, and the only copy that survives a flood.
600 dpi or better, saved as TIFF or PNG for the master file. Make JPEGs from that master for everyday use, never the other way round.
Scan the whole page, margins included, and scan the back as well. The back is often the only proof of where and when the ad ran.
Leave the automatic corrections off. Auto-contrast and auto-color make a scan look better and make it useless as evidence. Correct a copy, never the master.
Keep the file names meaningful and store a second copy somewhere that is not your house.
Repairing damage
Do nothing irreversible. Mold needs isolating from the rest of the collection immediately. Water damage needs air-drying flat, not heat. Anything valuable and badly damaged is worth a conservator's opinion before you attempt a repair — most amateur repairs cost more value than the original damage did.