How to handle a brittle photograph

Both hands, opposite edges, and let the print keep whatever shape it has already taken. Held by a single corner it bends under its own weight, and a dry print gives way along that bend.

Clean dry hands are perfectly adequate for ordinary snapshots. Cotton gloves earn their place with fragile surfaces and get in the way with anything glossy, where they cost you your grip.

A curl wants moisture in the air rather than pressure. Between two sheets of clean plain paper, under a book, in an ordinary room, most curls let go within a fortnight.

Rolled prints are the awkward ones — the school group, the regimental panorama, the seaside strip. Never unroll one that resists. It can be relaxed in a humidified box over several days, and if that is more equipment than the kitchen table can supply, scanning it while still slightly curled is a far better outcome than three pieces on the carpet.

Sellotape, which takes the emulsion with it whenever it is removed and stains the paper brown from beneath within a decade.

Glue in any form, the self-adhesive album page very much included.

Rubber bands, which perish and fuse to the print, and paper clips, which crease and then rust.

Wiping. Whatever sits on the surface is better left there: a cloth grinds it in and removes emulsion on the way past.

Keep the lot, down to the fragments too small to place. A paper envelope rather than a polythene bag, and write on the envelope instead of anything inside it.

Do not reassemble with anything adhesive. Arrange the pieces on the platen instead — a scan is the one form of reassembly that cannot cause further harm.

Cool, dark, dry and steady, in that order, and away from an outside wall. A cupboard on a landing beats the loft comfortably and beats the garage entirely.

Paper enclosures and plastic sleeves are both acceptable provided the plastic is polyester, polypropylene or polyethylene. The one to remove is PVC — the soft, faintly oily-smelling sleeving of older albums, which will bond itself to a print given enough years.