Soaked Myself in the Foot - A Cautionary Tale

[JollyElm]

PLEASE BE ADVISED:
As the tile says, this is a cautionary tale (specifically about 1970 Topps cards) for collectors who are perfectly okay with the soaking of cards.
If you're going to go on an argumentative anti-soak rant, please move along. This thread ain't for you. Thank you.


In preparing for an upcoming SGC submission, I decided to soak a few cards for a couple of reasons: to sort of pretty them up a touch by removing the built-up remnants of discolored past clinging to the surfaces and help flatten the warping of time a bit.
Nothing major at all - get them wet, weigh 'em down between paper towels under the might of the sun and wait a few days. Simple.

But here's where the story takes a dark, sad and sodden turn. After Mr. Sun did his business and dried away the dampness, I peeled away the paper towels and BOOM!!!!

Look what appeared (the paper towel shown had the backs of the cards resting on it):

soakproblem1970williemays02.jpg

While three of the four cards had the standard, obligatory brownish 'compressidue' rectangles appearing from the removal of the build-up,
the lone 1970 Topps card area was completely different. It had been yellowed out.
The soaking had removed a huge amount of the color printing from both sides (with the vast majority coming from the yellow back).
I have never seen anything like this before!!! (FYI: the other cards in the group are from the 1960s.)

The card was basically destroyed.
The bad news is the card happened to be a Willie frickin' Mays!!! Ugh!!!
The slightly less bad news is it had a tiny bit of paper loss and some wrinkles to begin with, so it was only destined to probably get a 2 at most, so my loss wasn't too great. (I guess that attempt at optimism could be stated as when life gives you yellow ink running, make lemonade??)

Yes, I realize soaking a low grade Mays card to begin with would make everyone question my sanity, but what's done is done.

Here's the saddened front...

soakproblem1970williemays01.jpg


My first thought was, could this be some sort of forgery, a fake card, and that's why the ink on back bled so easily and the gloss on front offered almost no protection whatsoever?? Based on the fact it has sat in my complete set album for 30+ years, that is very highly unlikely. Plus, examining the card itself leaves no doubt. This sucker is real and came out of the Duryea plant in 1970. No question about it.

So how do I figure out what happened here? Further experimentation. I dug through a box of random stuff in rough shape and grabbed a 1970 common. When I put it in water, a tiny bit of the blue sky on front started immediately bleeding out into the bath!!! Quickly removing it and patting it down, the paper towel also had all sorts of yellow from the back of the card covering it.
So, the result was the same!!

My non-scientific guess is there is something really different about the ink (perhaps, specifically the yellow ink?) used by Topps in 1970. The immediate breakdown of it by water is just too bizarre.

YOWZA!!!!!

The sample size is obviously tiny (only 2 cards), and possibly could be an anomaly, but to somewhat bastardize Capt. Quint's words, "I'll never put a 1970 Topps in the water again."

I urge anyone thinking of putting a 1970 Topps into the water to have second thoughts and turn that card into a land lubber instead. The risk of misadventure seems to be exceptionally great.

As a summation...be careful what you soak, for the water may come for YOU!!!!!!!!!

[bnorth]

That sucks and the reason I always try a common from the same set first.

[steve B]

That's very strange.

Lithography works because the inks aren't water based. So the damp plate keeps the ink away from places you don't want inked.

An ink for lithography that's water soluble after 44 years isn't anything I'd have expected. Fugitive inks that won't retain color in either water or oil based solvents are a thing as are doubly fugitive inks that lose color in nearly any fluid.

But those are mostly used to prevent something from being altered or reused - like checks or stamps.
Not really a concern Topps would have had back then. Or even now.