Book Jackets

While I was packing up my Children's Book Week display the other day, I noticed how many of my books had book jackets.  Just that morning, I was reading Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site to Ali (she'd pulled it off her bookshelf, then pulled about 10 others off too, but I still take it as a sign that she'll be an engineer like her daddy) when I noticed that the book jacket was super annoying.

As a librarian, I'm pretty protective of books.  It's hard to let Ali play with books like they are toys.  But everything is a toy to a baby.  Plastic cups, spoons, cell phones, bracelets, Altoids tins, those little ribbons in the hymnal for marking your place, these are all just toys to a baby, because play is real work.  Book jackets are often the first causality in baby book play, so why not remove them?

I love books like Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus with its clean, jacketless cover, and if you take the jackets off of most of your books, that's what you're left with.  So I took the plunge and scrapped all the jackets from my display book.  It wasn't easy, but it was necessary.

A couple of the books had covers that differed from the jacket, but I went for it anyway!

Forgive the glare, but you can still see that The Birthday Box cover is actually nicer without the jacket in my opinion.

Old school favorite If You Give a Mouse a Cookie has a very vintage cover, but I have two copies of this one, so one can keep the jacket, while the other goes away.

I didn't toss the jacket for First the Egg, because you'll see that when you remove it, it becomes First the Chicken.  The philosophical debate continues!

That's how I broke up with book jackets.  Now I just have to go after the books on Ali's bookshelf.  I think that I'll leave the jackets on my chapter books for now, but they might get the boot too.  After all, these are books that will be read and loved, not collected.  It's not like I'm planning on sending Ali to college with my vast collection of valuable middle grade chapter books.  No, that's what Beanie Babies are for!  (JK-Is that even a thing?)

Happy Reading!