Protect your instructions - an instruction to destroy their value?

To MOC, or not to MOC, that is the question...

Is it, really? I believe that almost every Lego fan that opens a new bought MISB set, digs through the plastic bags and then takes the instruction to start building step by step. The number of people that open a sealed Green Grocer box then shout “look at all those nice coloured stones!” and build a big fairytale castle before they use the original instructions, should be very small. I think most of us build a Lego model the first time(s) in the way our Lego designers expected us to do.

So, the building instructions are a main part of our sets. Surprise!

Lego instructions come to us in different shapes and colours. Some are just small flyers or leaflets, some are multi-volume instructions in DIN A4 or US letter format, some are impressive copies with ring bindings and there are high quality paper back books like the architecture or cuusoo instructions. But they all have one thing in common: they need to be handled with care! In most cases the paper is thin; the staples rip easily through the pages and especially the small sized instructions have the power to hide form us like chameleons in the jungle.

When I was a small boy I thought is was a good idea to protect my instructions from getting lost by glueing them in an exercise book. Now, they are on the spot – but glued in an exercise book.

If I wanted to sell a set with the instructions, I would have to tear them out of the book, destroying at least one page. But you could say: “I would rather buy a Lego model including the original instruction (although it has one damaged page), than a set with a missing instruction”. And I would totally agree. But, if you would have to decide between a damaged and good conditioned instruction… (Answer for yourself)

When you browse through the offers on bricklink you can buy almost every building instruction that has ever been published. But the value of a single copy sometimes almost exceeds the retail price of the hole set. (e.g. 10182 Café Corner instructions (new) starting at $198, 3450 Statue of Liberty instructions (new) starting at €95(~$124))

One the one hand you have those investors that only have MISB sets in darkened, air-conditioned, vibration free shelves: congratulations - they have done everything right to protect the value of their sets, especially for the condition of the building instructions!

On the other hand there are investors that have already opened sets and some of them actually built a model that they own. And none of them wants to decrease the value of their investment. But, with every building you have the chance to rip a cover or the center page out of its binding, to make a dog-ear in a page, or simply to loose the whole instruction.

So, how can you conserve the mint condition of your instruction? Answer: don’t use it! Keep it in the box and don’t even think of opening it. Use a digital copy from TLG or borrow a copy from your friend who owns the set as well.

If you are so bold to use your own copy to build the model, you have to be very careful! Don’t let your children help you to turn the pages, don’t eat chips or other greasy food while building (Lego instructions, particularly the ones with a black background, attract and enhance every fingerprint) and when you have disassembled the model try not to shake the box with the instructions inside when you store them away, because when you reopen the box the instruction can be in really bad shape from being bent and flexed under the stones. Newer Lego sets come with the instruction being separately packed in a plastic bag with a heavy cardboard to prevent folding on the transport. Keep this plastic bag to store the instructions in the box. But be careful to reinsert them without letting the sticky tape being glued to the cover.

When I bought the 10214 Tower Bridge I wanted to protect the instructions. I thought that this set could be build several times and that the instructions should be in good condition even after several uses. The three parts of the instruction don’t have a thicker paper for cover, so I decided to use a self-adhesive lamination like they use in libraries to cover the books. I considered myself as manually and technically skilled, so I bought the sticky foil, cut it to the right size and was surprised by the capability of the paper to be electrostatic charged. Every time I tried to aproach the foil to the pages they jumped to the sticky side, latched onto it and left me desperate with crumbled pages and a lot of entrapped air.

Of course, you cannot remove the foil without destroying the whole page. Fortunately I could buy an extra copy of the instructions before EOL so it was not a big loss, but with my unprofessional work I turned a near mint instruction into a damaged and used one.

A few weeks ago I tried another form of protection. I consulted a bookbinder and asked him to make hard cover books from several instructions. This included the repair of damages like ripped pages and the strengthening of the thin paper along the bindings. The original metal staples have been replaced by a thread-stitching. In my opinion the outcome is very pleasing. The black cover contrasts nicely with the silver colored stamping of the set numbers.

Because of the different orientation of the bindings, I had to split some of the multi-volume instructions (e.g. 10212 Imperial Shuttle, 10181 Eiffel Tower) in 2 books – one portrait and one landscape format. This still offers the possibility for two persons to build different parts of the model simultaneously. But it doubles the costs for this set. The instructions are now comparable to a book in a library: after several readings you see small traces of wear, but its lifetime is significantly extended. And the cost for a replacement instruction of a much asked EOL-Set exceeds the cost for the hard cover book by far. You can additionally put these hard cover books in matching paper boxes to minimize wearing when you move the boxes very often. On the secondary market I never saw any hard cover books made from original instructions, so I cannot say if these modifications will please a buyer of a used set or will decrease the value because of the loss of the original state.

Conclusion:
If you don’t want your copy of the instruction to loose value – don’t use it.
If you have (or just want) to use it – handle with care.
Use the original plastic bag with the card board (or something similar) to store it away.
Unless you work in a library or are really skilled – don’t use adhesive foil on thin paper instructions, or fix them very well.
Making hard cover books from the instructions is a possible way to protect them – but it is expensive. If you bundle several volumes in one book you cannot build them simultaneously and at this point, due to the lack of experience, it is open if you increase or decrease the value.

Source: Protect your instructions – an instruction to destroy their value?