When the irresistible snob meets the immovable sticker
Posted by David Hepworth on 17 July 2008 - 12:47pm.
Mr Amazon has just delivered a bunch of books for holiday reading, among them Andrew Smith's "Moondust", which everybody says is wonderful. It shows what a snob I am that the first thing I wanted to do was remove the "Richard and Judy recommends..." sticker that the publisher has placed on the front.
Only I can't! Because it's printed on! Now I wish Andrew Smith all the best in selling as many copies of his book as possible but I simply cannot be seen in public with products that are packaged in such a way that the message is that I've only just heard of them.
I'm an inexcusable snob, aren't I?
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Great book...
...fantastic read though, it'll be worth the ignominy of being identified as a Richard And Judy fan on the plane...
Rich
Simply....
wander into Waterstone's and peel off one of their "3 for 2" stickers and cover up offending logo...
Job's a good 'un.
Stewie Griffin had to do something similar in an episode of Family Guy after being teased about Oprah's book club!
Moondust
When I bought it the sticker was removable - which I did immediately! But then I thought through the books which have been through our front door recently and realised that my wife, who does not not suffer the curled lip reaction to R and J, is responsible for buying many of the ones that have proved to be at worst diverting and at best really good.
Over-rated book
The author insists on inserting himself into the narrative. Who gives a f- about him. I'm here for the astronauts, not stories about him hearing Man On The Moon by REM in a lift.
This DVD is excellent:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Space-Race-Christopher-Spencer/dp/B000AWKSVO/ref...
This book might also interest you:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Von-Braun-Dreamer-Space-Engineer/dp/0307262928/r...
Yes, you are a snob
But then so am I. I've been known to replace CD cases if the sticker hasn't come off properly. I always take price stickers off too.
You could be even more of a snob...
...and refuse to read it because of that recommendation.
My wife works in book publishing; the Richard And Judy stamp of approval has become one of the most important things around. Sales mean everything obviously.
But imagine the poor old cover artist/designer having to incorporate that into things.
No
I want a special sticker that said "had heard about years before Richard and Judy's researchers had got round to it" or maybe "reading it for the third time".
Dear David
Stop worrying what strangers think of you.
Stop trying to appear cool.
Think positive i.e. I am cool.
Happiness comes from within.
Remember - never wear socks with sandals.
Deidre(The Sun)
David
if I saw you reading the book I would think neither of those things.
I would, however, turn to my wife and comment that 'I bet he's only reading that because Richard and Judy told him to'.
(it is an excellent book, by the way)
Moondust
Great read-up there even with Oriana Fallaci's "If the Sun Dies", Mike Collins' "Carrying the Fire" and Wolfe's "the Right Stuff"-just don't expect the history to be very accurate.
The US paperback edition has a great cover-an extreme solution I know, but ...
N
PS sounds like a service that could be added to the mythical one that Flann O'Brien wrote about-having books pre-annotated with pithy and wise marginalia etc to save one doing it oneself ;-)
You think you've got problems, David...
Mr Pip by Lloyd Jones has been strongly recommended, and a copy loaned to me. There it sits, waiting to be taken to work and read on the tube. But I have not only "The Immovable Richard & Judy Sticker Problem", but also what can only be described as "The Extremely Girlie Cover Design Problem". Frankly, the embarrassment factor would be more than halved if I hid it behind your copy of Moondust.
Stickers are just plain "no"
in this house. They all come off immediately on purchase.
It's mainly because I have a bit of anti-thing about them but it wears off on others too!
Is there a doctor in the house......
No more than the rest of us
I suspect, but also, it's about wanting to see the cover properly and not having the spell broken by having Richard and Judy's faces pop into your mind or some price sticker.
Same with CDs with 'Nice Price' or 'Reduced' or 'Parental Warning - may have naughty bad words' or 'Promo Only, do not resell' crap stuck to 'em.
"Parental Warning" became a sort of badge of honour, didn't it?
After a jewel case breakage/replacement, my copy of Saint Etienne's 'Tiger Bay' now has a sticker on it which says PARENTAL ADVISORY – EXPLICIT LYRICS. It adds to the romance of the album immeasurably.
It did...
...but as soon as you started to see mass produced PMRC-style t-shirts, then all cultural cachet was lost.
"Includes the music from the Utterly Butterly ad"
snob
Yes you probably are, pull up a chair and join the crowd!
no offense meant...
I'm sure it's just the light and the angle, but that is one scary hand, Mr H!
Bill Withers
"Grandma's Hands".
Hand?
Oh how disappointing! I thought it was a very small ( and well-trained ) elephant.
I'll not say
what I thought it was
At least ...
... it won't tear part of the cover off when you try to remove it (a particular problem with gloss finishes, and the bane a bookseller's life when you have literally hundreds of the sticky little buggers to remove when a promotion changes).
Oddly enough, Faber used to be swines for the 'printed on' banner whenever one of their titles won the booker or similar; something which used to happen a lot. I always thought it a vulgarly boastful act for a supposedly up-market publisher.
(Bookseller sticker tip: lift up the edge with a thumb nail, then pinch the sticker and peel off with a circular motion. If there is any chance of the cover being ripped off too, then take the surface off the sticker off only, then wipe the residue with white spirit, leave to soak for 30 seconds and wipe off the rest of the sticker.)
Won't that leave your paperback
honking like a decorator's overalls? Can't have our coffee table decorations smelling like a tradesman. Good grief, man, have you no standards?
Not really
The white spirit evaporates so quickly off a smooth surface (and those are the ones which give the mmost trouble) that it is un-noticeable in a couple of minutes.
Also, thinking back to my bookshop days, most of the de-stickered books would be returned after the promo, bound for the pulper or the remainder shop. The aim was not to give the publisher an excuse to refuse the return on grounds of damage, I don't think the pulping machine ouwld care what they smelled like.
Do it yourself
Perhaps the answer is to fashion a cover from brown paper, as we had to do with our text books at school. If you like you can write the name of the book very blackly on the front to let people know what you're reading but without the attendant Richard-and-Judy shame.
BTW I thought Moondust was excellent. I understand LOUDspeaker's reservations about the author bringing himself into it, and I was worried I'd find this incredibly annoying. But, against all the odds, it worked for me as a meditation on what the moon landings mean to us today. I don't think the intention was a straight, factual account of the Apollo missions - that's covered by other books (such as those mentioned).
Make it safe
Remove the cover from an old copy of Forum or Razzle, glue it over the offending cover - no need ever to be embarrassed ever again on holiday. Perfect.
Simply...
...cut out a photograph of the moon, slightly larger in size than the Richard & Judy seal of approval, and then glue it to the front cover.
I'm just the same
More often than not.
This reminds me of one of my many howling, pointless idiocies. We went to New York a while ago and spent an afternoon in a few bookshops in Manhattan. I was struck by the quality of paperback books in the US. The actual look and feel of the things. Most are strongly bound and printed on very high quality paper which seems soft and creamy compared to the UK versions. The cover art seems more imaginative too. I bought a few.
Sometime after that, back at home, I wanted to read my copy of 'Any Human Heart' again which I had bought in the UK in paperback with that awful plain dark blue cover it's still being printed in. Realised I'd lent it to a friend who, when asked, realised he'd lost it.
On a whim I logged onto Barnes and Noble in the US and ordered a replacement copy for myself; the much more aesthetically pleasing US version. If I was happy to wait 3 weeks they'd ship it over for about 10 dollars. It arrived and its very nice, but I do feel a numpty about it. All that effort to get something across an ocean when it's available to me in the town centre 20 minutes away. Oh my carbon footprint! Don't tell Radiohead.
Radiohead?
They're probably touring.
It's a bit like being unable to give wine
...with a "specially selected by Somerfield" (say)printed on the albel. Pure unadulterated snobbery.
Count me in!
Whilst up in Edinburgh..
a couple of months back, we where invited around to a friends house for a meal. Mrs A was most amused when I refused to buy some wine on the grounds that the shelf label said "As recommended by the Daily Express." I was quite happy with the two bottles recommended in the Independent and the Guardian though.
Wine snobbery from someone who knows virtually nothing about wine....
"The Irresistible Snob"?
Mrs. Skirky begs to disagree. About the first bit.
If you're looking...
...for another novel, mine was not recommended by Richard and Judy and is both logo and sticker-free...
oh well if we're allowed to plug our own stuff here
i suppose i've one or two albums you lot might be interested in..."I want to see the bright lights tonight" is okay, innit...
I don't think...
...you'll have much luck around here mate. They can be a difficult bunch.
Richard Thompson?
Never heard of you mate. Didn't Britney Spears cover 'Ghosts In The Wind' recently?...
The only thing worse than a printed on blurb
is a sticker with a printed on blurb.
It sounds like I am not the only one who absolutely loathes ANYTHING added to cover artwork with a bloody sticker.
The creators of cover artwork should strike until the practice stops. Or arm themselves and stalk the publishing companies.
If I buy a CD, book, DVD or anything else that's shrink-wrapped, and the sticker's on the shrink-wrap, my heart leaps with joy; it means I can bin the little bastard without any will-it-won't-it-peel-off-cleanly anguish. If it's on the actual cover, I fall into a foul mood and wish terrible physical atrocities upon whoever the witless philistine was who decided to put it there.
Wonder...
...if Richard & Judy get a cut of the royalties, in the same way that Elvis had his name on songwriter credits.
I have a friend (hello Henry) who hates to buy records with barcodes on the back. Always searches out the early pre-barcode pressings.
eek
I'm a bugger for leaving the stickers on stuff, the Mr can't bear it, but y'know, I've got plenty of other stuff to get exercised about, this one doesn't matter to me.
Does my copy of [inset title of seminal album here] sound less good because it has a label that says £9.99? Thought not...
No
but it *looks* less good..!
Right!
How much better do we feel that our purchase of, say, Toad the Wet Sprocket: the early years, was full price, rather than 12 for £2 when HMV realised their folly in buying it in.......
I have conflicting feelings
I have conflicting feelings about stickers, which are somethimes difficult to reconcile. The knowledge that a particular Nick Cave promo was acquired from Scrotum Records of Uttoxeter for £2.99 is immaterial to me; the cachet is comfortably in my head. Consequently price stickers are immediately dispatched.
However, when a sticker or label is part of the product itself, I like it to remain, on the basis that I would expect it to be there if I bought it second-hand. Sometimes information is included with these stickers that is not available elsewhere in the package. Sometimes these labels are on the outside of shrinkwrap, which poses the dual challenge of removing the shrinkwrap without neatly bisecting the sticker or separating the label itself from the adhesive (a disappointingly frequent occurrence, sadly) and then finding somewhere neutral on the revealed artifact to position it.
A case in point. There were four actual (rather than low-quality download spit) singles released from Bjork's Volta LP, which took the form of 12" boxes with two 12" singles, a CD and a DVD contained therein. The packages were each held together by a ridiculously shaped Bjork sticker (not unlike the much smaller one that locked the limited edition of the album on CD), approximately 10" tall and of the irregular form of herself capering in some sort of Cretacious mollusc costume. This costume did not lend itself to even and symmetrical representation in sticker form; consequently there were many points at which even a forensic peeling would result in egregious damage to tentacles or somesuch. Now. Does one bisect her along the package join with a scalpel, risking a pleasingly straight memento on the vinyl contained therein and the inability to then reclose the bloody thing without recourse to twine, or does one attempt to smelt her off with a blowtorch assault? To complicate matters even further, the stickers included tracklistings and details seen nowhere else in the Box of Delights. And to top it all off, the sticker represented the only supplied way of keeping the package closed; its absence would cause all manner of evisceration catastrophes, with vinyl and CD and DVD all rolling unerringly towards the dustiest part of carpet.
It may seem a minor matter in the greater scheme of things, but my solution (many minutes of tongue-biting concentration spent tugging an eighth of an inch at a time of the stickers, then relocating same such that merely a stray appendage bridges the gap, thereby enabling me to re-secure stray flaps without requiring an archealogical expedition whenever I wanted to marvel at the extraordinary quantity of multicoured cardboard enclosed within) will result in my wincing slightly whenever I pass the B - Singles section. Having said that, I only ripped the CDs to the computer; I doubt if I'll open the packages again!
Darren
Hungerford, UK
you might definitely want to avoid
the limited edition Spiritualised 'Ladies and Gentlemen' album then...12 miniature CDs in medicine-tablet style foil wrap!
The Spiritualised is a tough
The Spiritualised is a tough one, certainly. Luckily I never really connected with them, but it sounds like a case for preserving the limited edition in aspic and buying a bog-standard CD for everyday use. Or maybe even taping it from a less limited-edition oriented friend, which would be morally acceptable to me as I had already paid for a copy!
Now, the Tumour Circus 7" picture disc of "Take Me Back Or I'll Drown Our Dog" had a die-cut hole right through the grooved area, with a sticker saying that the Jello Biafra collectors would buy it anyway.
Reader, I did.
Darren
Hungerford, UK
I feel your Bjork pain
As a fellow pristine packaging nerd, I still have shivers when recalling attempts to get the CD of Spiritualized's "Ladies and Gentlemen..." out of its faux pill blister pack...
christ that's scary...
both posts at 4:34 pm...
Just on a bogstandard level...
...don't you just hate the current trend for CDs to be slid into a tight envelope of cardboard, rather than th eplastic middle grippers. Good for the planet, no doubt, bad for the CD, I suspect. Most recent culpable example is the re-release of Pacific Ocean Blue.
(Whaddya mean, Pacific Ocean Blue ;-(, it's as great as I remember, being a longtime blogging enthusiast of it, despite Heppos sour words about it. Lovely Beach Boys with grit. Bambu, however, bar the first track, insufferable indulgent unlistenable claptrap)
I'm becoming increasingly unsure
of the tendency to reissue CDs in little vinyl replica sleeves. I thought the idea was enchanting at first - "Black Sea" in its little green bag! "Metamatic" with the inner sleeve! "Lark's Tongues In Aspic"!
On reflection, though, this approach means that
a) I have to buttress these issues discretely
b) the CDs are prone to scratching
c) the text is too small to read without an electron microscope
d) don't get me started on OBI strips. What are you supposed to do with those? Ref. my earlier post, I like to retain them as part of the original packaging (and Japanese translations of lyrics are all great - "Empty notes put the cat to strings" from "Vienna" is a personal favourite), but don't like to keep shrink-wrap unless it's on an import LP and then I slit the slot to get at the meat and leave the rest untouched.
Perhaps I need to reduce my set of Byzantine rules to be applied to different formats. It's exhausting!
You play them???
I thought the whole idea was to wrap them up in cotton wool and tissue paper, place in a shoe box at the back of a warm cupboard, to only be brought out for an episode of Antiques Roadshow; Pop Memorabilia in 25+ years.
That's what I have done with all my Busted CD singles. Should put my grandkids through university nicely.
Chance would be, etc.
Would that I could store my records in hermetically-sealed enclosures - I am currently dealing with a mouse infestation in the garage, of which spoor is getting dangerously close to boxes of books and LPs. Am considering applying for a shotgun license, in the absence of the ability to move to a building actually capable of storing my debris.
I refuse to believe, however, that I am the only person here who sometimes buys two copies of things that pertain to specific collections - one to use and one for best (or to promptly ebay when terrorised by particularly horrific tax bill).
2 copies?
I must admit, if I like a record very much and I see it going cheap somewhere I will stock up on extra copies. Very handy for giving as gifts to people I like. If I don't like them I give them records I can't stand anymore...
The mess left by stickers
So I buy the damn CD on the cheap (even though it might well be a most credible purchase in my own biased view) and I then try to remove the offending "only £2.99p" or "3 for £5" or whatever sticker, only to discover that it leaves half of the material in an unsightly mess all over the case. It won't peel off, it probably requires white spirit (or somesuch) which is in the shed (possibly) and obviously I can't be bothered to go and get it. So I leave the unsightly mess on the CD cover for ever, it sticks to the CD next to it on the shelf, and I spend long, fruitless evenings trying to persuade people (with little success) that the sticker originally extolled the virtues and the credibility of the artist rather than spelt out their spiralling fall from both the charts and full price sales. Probably time to invest in some replacement CD cases methinks... ?
Got to get this off my chest...
even if slightly off-topic.
Can't you change the Word CD cover mount sticky stuff please?
I always seem to strip away half the beard of the cover star when I remove my CD...!!
Subscribe
1. You get it early
2. Front cover has less on it's
3. CD is loose in the bag with no sticky stuff
4. Its cheaper
Yeah but...
I kind of like having to go out and hunt for the mag.
It's like I prefer sifting through racks of records to internet shopping by Amazon or such like.
Still, if it means the beards stay intact I might just go for the subscription!
Funny really
While I idly flicked through this topic (I share your pain Mr H; I assume it's a paperback rather than a hardback with removable dustcover?) my mind wandered to magazines of which we get office voucher copies, their glorious and hard-thought cover designs usually besmirched by a callously-placed recipient sticker: Rolling Stone seems to suffer unduly in this respect.
Discovering that The Word comes in its own bag, and furthermore negates the CD-glue-beard-trim problem outlined above, may well be the tipping point in my long-running hum-haa over whether or not to subscribe. (Procrastination has been caused not by content as much as fear: three of the last four magazines my wife and/or I have subscribed to have gone bust within the subscription period, leaving us short of both cash and decent reading material. Would hate to be a Jonah to the best new magazine of the past, ooh, decade at least.)