Comic pressing,
explained honestly.

Every week someone sends me a photo of a comic with a spine roll or a wavy cover and asks the same thing: "Can this be pressed?" And every week the honest answer is "it depends on what is actually wrong with it". Pressing is the most misunderstood word in comic collecting. Half the hobby thinks it is cheating, the other half thinks it is magic, and both halves are wrong. This is the plain version, from someone who buys pressed and unpressed books every week and has to price the difference.

I do not offer pressing myself. That is worth saying up front, because this guide is not selling you anything. It is here so you stop paying to press books that cannot be helped, and stop leaving grade on the table on the ones that can.

What pressing actually is

A professional press puts a comic between smooth, flat surfaces under controlled heat, pressure and a little humidity, for long enough for the paper fibres to relax and take a new shape. That is the whole trick. Paper has a memory. Bend it and the fibres on the outside of the bend stretch while the inside compresses. Heat and moisture let them move, pressure tells them where to settle, and cooling locks them there.

Notice what is not in that description. Nothing is added to the book. Nothing is painted, glued, trimmed or filled. That single fact is the reason pressing sits on the right side of the most important line in grading.

Is pressing restoration? CGC's answer

No. CGC defines restoration as adding foreign material to a comic to return its appearance to an ideal or original state. Colour touch, piece fill, tear seals with adhesive, re-glossing, trimming, married pages. Those earn the purple Restored label, and the purple label takes a large slice off the price of almost any book.

There is a third category worth knowing, because people confuse it with pressing. Conservation covers professional structural repairs: tear seals, spine split seals, reinforcement, staple replacement and professional cleaning. Those get CGC's blue and grey Conserved label. They are not the purple label, but they are disclosed. Pressing is not conservation either. It is simply not noted.

So if someone tells you pressing is cheating, ask them why the grading company does it in-house. If someone tells you a pressed book is "restored", they are wrong on the definition and wrong on the label.

What pressing can fix

The rule of thumb is one sentence long. Pressing fixes shape. It does not fix damage. If the paper is intact but in the wrong shape, a press can usually help. If the paper or ink is broken, stained or missing, it cannot.

That left-hand list is more or less CGC's own list of "good defects" for its pressing service, and the right-hand list is its "bad defects". I have not invented a category. The distinction is whether the fibres are merely bent or actually broken, and the fastest way to tell on a crease is whether it breaks colour, which gets its own guide.

Spine roll: the one everyone asks about

Spine roll is when the whole book has been stored leaning or squeezed so that the cover and pages migrate round the spine. From the front you see the spine curling towards you, or the back cover peeking out along the left edge. It is the classic symptom of a long box packed too loose, or comics stood up in a pile against a wall.

Good news: it is on the pressable list, because nothing is broken. The paper has been pushed into a curve and a press can persuade it back. A few things change that answer:

• Spine stress lines that break colour. A rolled spine often comes with little horizontal ticks where the fold has cracked the ink. The roll will flatten. The ticks will not.
• Age and paper quality. A rolled 1990s book with white pages is an easy job. A rolled 1940s book with tanned, brittle pages is a book you leave alone, because heat on brittle paper is how you end up with a spine split.
• How long it has been rolled. Decades of roll can set. A press will still improve it, but "improve" and "erase" are different words.

Waves, ripples and stacking bends

Waviness is almost always a moisture story. The book has lived somewhere the humidity swings, the paper has taken on water and let it go a hundred times, and every cycle leaves it a little less flat. Ripples along the edge, a cover that will not sit flat, a gentle warp across the whole book. On UK collections from lofts, garages and spare rooms with a radiator on a timer, I see it constantly.

This is pressing's best case. Waviness is pure shape, the fibres are intact, and a competent press with the right humidity will take a wavy book flat. The important bit is what you do afterwards. Put a freshly pressed book back in the same damp room and it will wave again. Pressing is the cure, storage is the prevention, and the second one is cheaper.

Stacking bends are the flat-pile cousin. Comics stored in a horizontal pile take the weight of everything above them, and the ones near the bottom pick up a diagonal bend from a corner or a staple impression from the book above. Also pressable, for the same reason.

Foxing, tanning and staining

Here is where hopes get dashed. Foxing is the reddish-brown spotting you see on old paper, generally put down to mould activity and metal impurities in the paper reacting over time. Tanning is the paper itself going brown as it oxidises, starting from the edges. Staining is anything that has soaked in: water, tea, damp, rust from the staples.

None of those are shape problems. They are chemical changes in the paper, and a press changes shape. You can press a foxed book perfectly flat and it will be a perfectly flat foxed book. Removing that kind of damage means cleaning, and the cleaning that touches it, water or solvent, is on CGC's list of restoration and conservation techniques. Done professionally it gets a Conserved label; done at home it usually gets a ruined comic.

If someone offers to press the foxing out of your Silver Age book, that is your cue to walk away. They either do not understand pressing or they are planning to do something to your comic that is not pressing.

When not to press a comic

CGC's own pressing page warns against pressing books that show tanning, brittleness, spine splits, covers or pages loose from a staple, or pieces that are barely attached. I would add a few from experience. Do not press:

1. Anything with brittle paper. Heat on brittle paper is how pages crack, staples tear through and chips fall off the spine. Golden Age books in particular need a specialist opinion first, and often the answer is no.
2. Anything with loose or detached staples. The press cannot hold the book together and the pressure can shift the pages.
3. Metal, chromium, acetate or embossed covers. Pressing does nothing useful to them and can flatten an embossed design you were meant to keep. CGC lists these as ineffective to press.
4. Books whose only defects are unpressable. If the flaw holding the grade down is a colour-breaking crease or a stain, pressing costs you money and returns the same grade.
5. Books where the grade bump does not pay. A press that takes an ordinary comic from 9.2 to 9.4 has changed nothing anyone will pay for. On a key, that same bump can matter. Run the numbers before you spend them; the calculator on my grading guide includes a pressing line for exactly this reason.
6. Books you have not looked at under a lamp. Every press decision starts with raking light across both covers. If you have not done that, you do not yet know what you are paying to fix.

Does pressing add value?

Only where it adds grade, and only where the grade adds money. Those are two separate tests and most books fail at least one of them.

On a modern key with a stacking bend and otherwise perfect paper, a press can be the difference between a 9.6 and a 9.8, and on the right book that gap is the whole reason to grade. On a 1970s book that is a solid 6.0 because of a stain and a colour-breaking crease, a press might take it to a 6.0 that sits flatter. Same grade, same money, minus the pressing fee.

What I actually do when a book lands on my desk is this: raking light across both covers, a look at the spine ticks for colour breaks, a check of the paper at the staples for brittleness, then a decision about whether the defects I can see are on the left-hand list or the right-hand list above. If they are on the left and the book is worth grading, it gets pressed. If they are on the right, it gets described honestly and sold as it is. That is the whole method and you can do it at your kitchen table.

Should you press it yourself?

No. I know there are videos. I have also seen the results of the videos: glossy covers with the gloss burnt off, staples that have printed through the cover, wrinkles pressed permanently into a book that only had a wave. A professional press is a calibrated machine and a lot of judgement about heat, time and humidity for each paper stock. A household iron is neither.

If the book is worth pressing, it is worth paying someone with the right equipment. If it is not worth that fee, it is not worth risking with an iron either. There is no third option where the maths works.