Covering books. AIBU to think we were had at school in the past

[Hottubtimemachine]

My kids are at senior school and there has not been one mention of covering their books. I remember spending literally HOURS doing this and even got a detention once for not covering my French book.
Why were we made to do this? What was the point? Does anyone still do it? AIBU to think teachers robbed me of hours of my life 😉

Was definitely only exercise books we covered at my school. I don't recall taking text books home or having to buy any so can't see why they would be covered if they belonged to school? Maybe a different age group though I was at secondary 1989 onwards. I used to buy single sheet wrapping paper from the card shop, or use posters from magazines etc

@Hottubtimemachine I buy plastic slip-on covers. They look good, do the job and you can re-use them when they fill one book and get a new one.

But a secondary (girls) school near me hands out subject-themed pictures to year 7 which they're meant to colour in and use to cover their books. That would go down like a lead balloon in a co-currucular or boys school, and I suspect many of the girls at this school find it tedious too.

I used to go to Laura ashley with my mum and we'd get all different wallpaper samples to cover the books with I loved it 😍

[quote LukeEvansWife]@KilledByWitches I LOVED Blackie Lawless and his exploding codpiece [/quote]
Didn't we all!?
And there was definitely a 'fear' around metal back then as well so that added shock value.

YY to the fear - I loved that people thought it was all about sacrificing to Satan

Used to use wallpaper for mine!

DD didn't need to do it but I covered hers with sticky back plastic to protect them and make them wipeable.

I was explaining this to my dc recently and dh decided I was posh because he had to use whatever wallpaper was in the house whereas my mum took me to choose my roll of wallpaper to cover my books with each year dc think we’re nuts and ancient.

I worked out a way of placing the cover so that I was able to slip the cover off each book and onto a new one when I got a new jotter. I really wanted the plastic covers some schoolmates had.

@BastardMonkfish

What do people use to back books with these days?

In Italy most Primary and Junior schools want covered books and they’ve invented a shrink wrapping machine called Colibrì (humming bird/with books pun). For €1 at a time I’m happy to pay rather than struggle with a roll of transparent plastic.

Eldest ds is now year 13 but he had to do all of his until year 10 when they eased off a little. Younger D's in yr9 and no one's said anything about covering books since before covid.
We covered with the sticky back stuff the first year then got the transparent book covers from Raymans from yr 8.
As a kid dad used to give us wallpaper, every subject would be different. It was fun to do but also a bit of a headache

Gosh, this take me back. I used to cover mine with juicy pics from Photo Love! Makes me feel old. My Yr8 DC has never been asked to do this. Boring.

I used to love covering my books ❤️ Sometimes wall paper, teachers would often bring in walllpaper sample books to use. Sometimes I would have the joys of going to our local corner shop and carefully choosing sheets of gift wrapping. Then there were the Smash Hits posters - I remember Simon Le Bon on my biology exercise book. My dad came home from parents’ evening and the teacher saying ‘She’s rather distracted’ looking pointedly down at my beautifully Mr Le Bon covered book!!! Hmff!! The text books with really thick spines took a very special skill 😉

Ds is now 18 and out of education. Not one single solitary book ever needed covering 😌😌😌😌😌

Blimey the pointless Busywork starts early. Luckily my dc (nor I) have ever had to do this.
I've still not recovered from my dd getting bad marks in her MATHS, as her 'draw a poster of your favourite mathematician' was not neat enough.

I remember doing it using wrapping paper or even posters from magazines. They were A5 size.
My kids secondary books are A4 size and have the school name and logo on. They have a different colour for each subject so they don’t cover them. They’re much better quality than the ones we had.

For covering books I preferred brown paper because you could make neater corners than using wallpaper. And my mum could pinch it from work. The best bit was writing your name on the bookplate inside the book (in your neatest handwriting because it would be there for ever) and looking to see who else had had the book before you and hoping it wasn’t your nasty older sister.
Name Form. Issued. Returned
Viques Class 3G Dark ages. Still dark ages

We had to embroider a cross stitch cover for our hymn books in binka fabric. My dear mother managed to get the wrong edition of the hymn book ( dont ask, she always managed to get things slightly squiff) which had all the same hymns in the right order luckily but was very slightly taller than the standard edition so the piece of binka I was given didn’t quite fit. The teacher in charge of supervising this important task had already cut all the binka to the expected size, so she said, and there wasn’t an uncut scrap left in the cupboard ( like I believed that, there was probably a binka mountain hidden there) so my poor little hymn book spent its life squashed into a cover that was stretched within an inch of its life and it never looked quite right.

Covering exercise books does (or did) make sense as the paper front and backs ripped very easily, at least when I was at school. Maybe the books are better quality now but mine would never have survived the year intact if they hadn't been covered.

I still put Sellotape around the edges of paperbacks!

Please can someone share why exercise books were wrapped too? There is zero logic in that
I always assumed it was to somewhat protect the covers from damage in bags / rain as The ones I didn’t cover always ended up with the cover hanging off. Towards the end of the book the ones I did cover, the poster I covered with would be shredded but the actual cover Was intact

Oh gosh I remember this. I think we had to do it in years 7-9, and then the school kind of gave up on trying to make us.

I was, sadly, a book covering perfectionist, so my overriding memories of it are of evenings on the floor of the living room with “Wogan” on in the background, weeping copiously to my mum after the third or fourth abortive attempt to make the paper lie flat or get the sticky-backed plastic to go on without bubbles. The pain, the pain! 😩😱

I remember a friend showing me how to get the cover to stay on without using sellotape (by tucking corners in). This was great because at the end of the year we could carefully remove our cover and because our books for some subjects were in the same series, the cover could be reused the following year.

I got made fun of because I had lame wrapping paper 😭. I remember this one girl giving me a withering look and saying "why do you have such sad wrapping paper".

Still rankles 25 years later.

Did anyone else have to fold and sew blank sheets of paper into little books in primary school, rather than having exercise books for projects? I remember having to do that and also I think I must have been absent when we were taught how to do it as I never really got the hang of how to do it!

Brown paper for all my books and exercise books. Obvs took the wrong ones to the wrong class multiple times.

Was a happy day when we moved on to lever arch files.

These days they just have laptops!

@Curlygirl06

I'd forgotten about that! I went to school in Australia and we had to cover text books and exercise books AND our foolscap 2 ring binders. ( you young 'uns, foolscap folders is the equivalent of A4 folders!) Can you remember how we cut the corners diagonally so that the corners would fold down neatly?

I do remember cutting the corners but always made a complete pig's ear of it 😂

I so wanted to make it look neat and lovely but it was never to be!