Excellent point!
While I agree with most of this....I will say the process of restoration in general is not reversible in a technical sense...if a poster has been cleaned, sutured, re-sized, fold lines relaxed and washed to neutralize the chemical acidity of the inks...its unalterably changed...you can't really recreate those age identifiers....so in essence as soon as you attempt anything but the most minor restoration then you are altering the poster irreversibly....??
(I for one do not own a single backed poster...I sold my last linen backed one in 2015 and I only buy unbacked small format posters now like lobby cards, window cards, half sheets and inserts...)
correct!
also, your friend that says all museums linenback posters for display.. not so, except for oversized material or damaged goods that need to be made displayable. Posters that will fit in a frame just fine with museum directors of intelligence, do not change the structure of items unless it's needed, and they don't spend money on stuff in their collections - unless someone else pays for it.
if you give your collection to an institution, they catalogue it, box it up & put it in storage. The only time it is taken down is when someone sees something on the inventory they want for display or more likely - research - and then it is boxed back up & put away again.
Unless you actually give them 5 million $ to store, conserve, and display your collection in the wing built with the trust from your 5 million.
o/w... they are the worst places for your collection to go, sadly.
so they don't spend money on linenbacking, unless YOU paid for it.