Book Covers
 

Along the school supplies topic....

If you've been reading my posts you know it's been a huge battle with my kids to fight the materialistic urges so prevalent in this community and this culture in general.

The latest battle is book covers.

Now, when I was a kid, if you needed to put a protective cover on your History book, you cut up a grocery bag and that was that. Everybody used them. Sometimes people got creative and used freezer/butcher paper.

Now the kids use these cheesey stretchy nylon things that retail for about a buck each. Ridiculous!

I gave in and bought my DD one of them, it was on discount for 89 cents and I thought she'd only have one book to cover. Wrong.

The second book got the grocery bag treatment. DD was NOT happy about this. "Nobody does that, mom!" she wailed. I didn't get it. I mean, it's just a book cover! And unlike the silly nylon ones, you can decorate them any way you want to, draw on them, doodle, let your creativity shine! Mess it up? Put on a new one for free!

I told DD that if "nobody does that" then it was high time she became a trendsetter. Make it look cool, I told her. Get out the rubber stamps and glitter glue. Next thing you know, the kids will be ditching their cheesy nylon covers and slapping on some grocery bags, begging their moms to ask for "paper, not plastic" at the checkout.

I had another thought too -- when I was in high school, a local restaurant (Frisch's/Shoney's) gave out free book covers as an advertising method. Most kids put them on normally but I remember with a little extra effort we could put them on inside out so they were blank. :) Wonder why you don't see that anymore? I'd think it would be a great idea for any business that targets kids. Not that I approve of kids being bombarded with advertising, mind you -- but I don't want to buy book covers either.

Anyone know of a business that gives these out? I'd love to get hold of them and send them to the school.

Know what I'd like to do? Hold a book cover workshop. Teach these kids how to make the things out of grocery bags! I think it must be a lost art!

Had the same battle here, (Mum 'n Dad won), and home-made/decorated bookcovers were adopted. More enthusiastically when friends started to copy them. HAH! (Pat on back for Mum 'n Dad) LOL

When we were in the Houston area, the kids could not use the paper bag book covers as according to the teachers 'required tape' to keep them on properly and they didn't want the books ruined with tape.

I first thought it was the kids just wanting the cloth type, but I learned differently when after forcing DS to cover a book with a grocery bag, he got detention and a note sent home for failing to follow instructions.

I felt so bad for getting DS in trouble.


Diane

That's crazy! When it's done properly, the tape need never touch the book.

Maybe the teachers didn't know how to make them the right way?

When I needed to cover books, I broke out my mom's scrap fabric stash. One was denim with lace hearts, another was red satin.

The other kids were sooo jealous. :)

I am one that loves those fabric book covers. I buy a stash of them when they go on sale for 50 cents. My kids have reused the same ones for several years. Covering those books is very frustrating for me, I have no artistic talent!

Check with your local library. They would most likely love to have you come and do a workshop there. Check with the "teen dept" ours in the States always have a summer reading thing going in the summer and were looking for people to come in and "teach" something for free. You could start the next trend for the 2008-2009 school year.

Absolutely, positively, nobody in your school knows how to put paper book covers on correctly. I was the art teacher, and the ONLY one who could do it. Teachers included.

I'm talking about the cut-angled-tabs method, not just fold-and-tape.

Also, the paper book cover companies have lost their sponsors. Nobody wants to pay for the advertising that was on the papers. Those disappeared about seven or eight years ago in my school district.

Remember how your parents drove you nuts with their stories of how things used to be? We are doing it to our children. It doesn't really matter how it used to be. Our children have a different reality. We need to be as open to understanding *them* and their lives as we want them to be to listening to our stories of yesteryear. Maybe even more open, since they are the ones truly living in the present.

Too funny- my inlaws took the kids for last minute supplies and said NO to the fabric covers, they were more than a buck a pop up here.
Yesterday was the first day of school and we had to cover books, I had only one paper bag!
I went into my stash of wrapping paper/gift bags and found a giant used birthday bag, dd loves her birthday cake science book! dh is an artist and artistically wrote the subject on the paper bag ones for ds, kind of like graffitti/ gothic type skateboard letter, and ds colored the insides of the letters with colored pencil.... they were very pleased with their creative book covers.

Yes, if done correctly the paper ones never have tape touch the book. Wncramsey, if my kid had gotten suspension for something I told him to do, well I'd be down at the principal's office myself waiting in line for punishment (and discussion).

Ds has several of those stretchy book covers, and they weren't cheap but they are several years old so they were a decent value. If your kids insist on those intead of paper, couldn't they pay for them?

The school would have gotten a visit from me over that one. That's ridiculous. They also would have been told to pay for the store bought book covers or deal with the paper bag ones, and shown a copy of my property tax statement. Sheesh.

Rose you are so right about this, and I try to remember what it felt like and how I thought when I was the age of my kids. Sometimes it is harder than others.

I am hoping that once they are older, my kids will look back on my stories of *how things used to be* with some of the same nostalgia I have for the stories my dad and mom told me.

This could probably use its own thread; it's a good topic for discussion.

That is how I did it...don't know about the "angle and cut" method mentioned above...

but did you notice in the comments someone posted a warning about taping ON the book? Even though it's pretty clear in the instructions that the tape never should actually touch the book? :rolleyes:

Directions for sewing a cloth cover

http://sewing.about.com/library/weekly/aa081104a.htm

Our school used to give out the covers to advertise the school. They were done in black and white. I thought they were neat as you could also write on them.

Well, here is my 'when I was a kid' story... our elementary school used to give us the book covers the day we got our books. They were the same brown paper material that paper bags are made out of, but blank, no adverts or writing on them, and there was some way they were folded at the corners, but it's been so long I don't remember how it was done. No tape that I recall, just folding. They also didn't seem to stay on particularly well, but we had to use them. By the end of the school year they were always covered in doodles and colored pencil.

My gosh folks -- we picked these things up at the local store for less than 50 cents each. Is it really that big of a deal? It's kind of a contest to see who can find the craziest colored ones.

The paper covers have gone the way of the PeeChees -- they're just not used anymore.

At any rate, my dd has used the same covers for the last couple of years -- pretty good return on something so cheap to start with.

Tracy

Our walm*rt has the stretchy book covers on clearance for 25 cents right now.........

Around here paper bags are hard to get. The few stores that have them, have only little ones, not big practical bags.

We never used tape on bookcovers. If done right tape isn't needed. The Army used to pass book covers out by the handful during the local fairs. I still have a workbook with the Army book cover on it. No tape and it was used daily.

Can someone tell me why you cover textbooks?

Is it a regional thing, cause we never covered books when I was a kid, and my kids, who go to a different school than I did don't cover books.

Why are you required to cover textbooks?

Because kids aren't typically taught and don't care to learn how to take care of their belongings, and so the books get dropped, stepped on, slid across surfaces, splashed on, spilled on, and generally abused during the course of a year in school.

We used to use left over wallpaper.

I have a stash of those huge wallpaper sample books that the local store was throwing away. They were discontinued patterns. Great for homeschool projects.

Pauline

I graduated from high school seven years ago, and I always used the paper covers. If I wanted to get fancy and make sure they lasted even longer, I'd slap a sheet of contac paper on top of whatever pictures or designs I had on them. I seem to remember those stretchy covers coming out around my senior year and being told not to use them, as they left some kind of residue on the books that the school didn't like.

The thought occurs to me that really, the school could probably just have the kids leave those stretchy covers on the books for whoever gets them the following year, but I'm sure then you'd have people freaking out because darn it, they shelled out the buck for that plastic cover, et cetera.

Not that this is a new thing, since schools have been making kids cover their books at least since my mom was a kid. Which isn't totally unreasonable, considering that most textbooks run at least $50 a pop (which is a whole different rant of mine).

There are fights worth fighting, and fights that just use up your "capital" and make it harder to win the fights that matter.

Fighting about spending a dollar for a book cover falls into the second catagory, IMHO.

The fact is that everything was not, in fact, better in the old days. And one of those things is book covers. If I had a book to cover now, I would want the nylon, too.

Save your ammo for fighting about bare-midriff tops, juicy couture and piercings.