Absorene Book and Document Cleaner

Have an book or document that has gotten dirty? Absorene cleans without harming delicate paper!

Works like a mixture of Play Doh and a big pink eraser. When my friend's house burned down, we saved the bulk of her soot-smeared music library with this stuff. You just lightly wipe in one direction and the soot residue lifts off the paper surface and sticks to the surface of the Absorene, like chalk sticks to a felt eraser. You then knead the residue into the Absorene and keep using it. I used a golf ball-sized wad of it until it turned the color of a new charcoal briquette. It continued to clean, but began to dry out and crumble a lot. The crumbles will stick to the paper, so I would then toss it and get a fresh lump. A little goes a long way. I probably cleaned two thousand pages of music with one tub of Absorene. It will not remove water/soot stains that are dried into the paper. It only removes the powdery residues on the surface of the paper, but it does a very good job of that. Good stuff.

This is great for cleaning books and documents. I'm recovering from a house fire, but have found that dust and other kinds of stain or residue also respond. In some cases, like when doing the edges of the pages, it may leave a little trail of bits, but if I let them dry, they brush right off later. This is also great for getting dust out from among the buttons on a remote control device, or out of the crevasses of carved wood, for example. It's a little like Silly Putty, the way it picks stuff up. Just follow the directions and you should be pleased. A little goes a long way.

I bought this to clean marks off wallpaper. At first I thought it didn't work, but then I realized I just needed to persist! Some tips... 1) You need to start with a good-sized chunk—golf ball-sized, at least—so that you have something to grip while you wipe the wall. And definitely warm it up so you don't leave flakes on the wall. I started out using quarter-sized pieces and it just fell apart into flakes. 2) Put on some music and give the stain a song or two before you give up. This stuff is not Magic Eraser—the difference will be almost imperceptible at first. If I saw no change after 2 or 3 songs I knew this stuff was not going to get that particular stain. But there was only one I had to give up on. 3) If the stain has a slightly shiny surface, it may just be leftover wallpaper paste, which you can easily wipe off with a damp rag instead of putting in all the elbow grease with this stuff.

Works fine so far.

Well didn’t work on any book I tried. I’ll keep it though and see if it’s helpful on something else. If I find something I does work on good I’ll update review.

Rememberaing helping Mom and Dad clean wallpaper in the 1940's, I thought of this product when I was trying to revive the color and pattern of the interior of an old humpback trunk I wanted to restore. I had used a gum eraser with some success, but to do the entire interior of a trunk with a small eraser was not going to work. I could not find wallpaper cleaner as I had known it at any of our largest local hardware stores. While this produict looked and felt like the wallpaper cleaner of old, it was not up to the task I had in mind. The gum eraser did better. The Absorene was getting black with removed dirt, but the paper simply did not look that different. Perhaps there is just too much impregnated dirt from over 100 years accumulation and perhaps the gum eraser was actually rubbing away a small layer of the paper. I will have to cover the old paper with new in order to restore the trunk.

I have 30+ year old wallpaper which hasn't been cleaned in ages. We're getting ready to sell the house, and some sections which were behind furniture or above heating ducts are really dirty. I've tried dry-cleaning sponges, Play-Doh, natural sponge moistened with Dawn dishwashing detergent, artist's cleaning pads, etc. etc. Everything I've tried worked at least a little - but this product did by far the best job. Make a ball at least the size of a golf ball and knead it into the shape of a big eraser - then use it like you would an eraser on the surface of the wallpaper. As it picks up grime, knead it more to fold the dirt into the putty and keep going. As you can see in the picture, it basically just erases the grime -- which would not come off using other techniques. Some folks are saying it takes a lot of work to get good results, but I'm finding that it's relatively easy -- similar to erasing a pencil sketch on paper. Oh, the dark spots in the picture are screw holes. Can't erase them... Of course, your results may vary depending on the type of wallpaper you have and what sort of grime you're up against. I had professional cleaners tell me there was no way to clean the old wallpaper-- it would be too risky. They were wrong. : )