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I was in Spencer Research Library in the KU campus one day
and noticed a patron using bumper stickers.
I wasn't even that aware the we had a collection of bumper stickers at that point,
and it got me thinking about bumper stickers.
How they are preserved. What they're made of.
I realized I had not seen any information in a professional literature
about their manufacture, or their preservation, so that got me started.
I'm Whitney Baker, and I'm the Conservator and Associate Librarian
in the Preservation Department of KU Libraries,
and I've been here at KU for eight years.
In my role as the conservator,
I'm responsible for the repair and maintenance of our library collections.
Theres seven branch libraries on campus and in particular my focus,
and research, and work is rare books and manuscripts,
so bumper stickers is a bit of a departure.
Most people attribute the creation of the bumper sticker to a man name Forest Gill,
who was a screen printer from Kansas City, Kansas,
and his legacy, the company, is still around, just down the road.
So it's definitely, I think we can claim it for Kansas, as a Kansas creation.
I believe a lot of institutions collect bumper stickers
in part for their social history and popular culture factors.
If you are also a political institution such as a presidential library, museum,
and you're fully collecting about a president for example,
bumper stickers would fall right into that category.
In addition they make wonderful items for exhibits,
and so you often see them because they fairly wordlessly convey a time and a place.
Take you to the 60s or the 50s without a lot of text,
or even a lot of space, being taken up in an exhibit.
And they're colorful and visual as well.
The earliest bumper stickers were printed on paper.
They were usually screen printed,
which was a fairly economical way of printing.
Early on as I mentioned, they used daylight fluorescent inks,
so it would usually be one florescent color,
and what's wonderful about daylight florescent inks
is that they would glow in the daylight without needing blacklight.
It was that new technology developed right in the 30s, right before World War II.
And as time progressed vinyl became more important because
the paper bumper stickers didn't really hold up that well to the elements.
They would be waxed or varnished in some way,
but of course they're not made to last very long,
but they also left this gummy residue
that people didn't really like to have on their car.
These are tenaciously adhesive items,
so it seems that they need to be separated from one another,
certainly separated from other types of materials,
and stored upright, not in stacks.
In a perfect world the vinyl and paper shouldn't be together.
But I've tried to think practically,
because most collecting institutions are not rolling in the dough.
They will not have, be able to spend a lot of money on these collections.
So, generally storing them in the alkaline folders as we do with other types of collections,
but for the very sticky ones they need some other type of material.
For example, there's a paper that we use in conservation
that's impregnate with silicone, called silicone release paper.
I have actually never put a bumper sticker on a car.
In fact, I'm a pedestrian most of the time, so I'm not a big car person.
So this is not grown out of some personal interest on bumper stickers.
But yes, I always enjoy seeing them,
and since I've started this research project they're ubiquitous,
but they're also very vulnerable.
So I find important to collect since they're such a part of American popular culture.