Book Makeovers

Whenever we have a little down time in the library, we've started giving some of the older books makeovers to make them look a little more appealing.  Sometimes this just means taking off the old mylar dust jacket cover and putting on a new one, but sometimes it means peeling lamination off the cover (whoever thought it was a good idea to laminate dust jackets was wrong), removing stickers, putting on new stickers, and covering with a new mylar dust jacket cover.  Removing the stickers is often a lengthy process involving scraping with fingernails and then using rubbing alcohol on a q-tip to get rid of any extra stickiness as best as we can.

A lot of our older books have bar codes and date due stickers on the front of the book, so often our makeovers involve taking these stickers off the front and putting new ones on the back.  Here's an example that I worked on today:

Before

After

As you can see, sometimes there's not much we can do about ugly or cheesy covers (like The Lives of Christopher Chant above), but they do look a little more appealing without stickers covering the pictures, and if it makes a student more likely to consider the book, it's worth the effort and time.