? Protecting Books?

[cpapay]

For Christmas we bought our DD the hardback version of "Lighthouse Lullaby"....this is her favorite book. My question is how in the world do I protect the jacket and cover? I searched around and haven't been able to find a plastic jacket like they put on the books at the library. Any ideas? Do I just take the jacket off and save it for later?

thanks!

carrie

[hellokitty]

I used to save all of my kids' book jackets, thinking that someday I'd put them back on. Then I just got sick of a huge stack of book jackets and tossed them. Books are for reading, kids will understandably be rough on books, but they are there for children to explore, so they are going to get a little bit beat up sometimes. You do your best to help them understand that they need to take care of their books. I also prefer hardcover books, b/c they are a little bit sturdier. For books that I am really anal about (I am an usborne books consultant, so my sample books are also the books that our family use, so I care about the condition of my usborne books a lot, but it helps that they are also the highest quality and most sturdy books that we own, esp their board books), or very delicate books with lots of pop ups and flaps, I usually put those aside in another room or on a high shelf and bring them out when the kids want them and then put them back away again. Or I will leave them out on the coffee table, but only if I am sitting there, so that they can look at the book or have me read the book to them while I am present. They have a bunch of books in a basket that I am not anal about at all, and they have full access to them. So, only a small % of books are ones that I am esp careful about. I have two boys under the age of four and so far I can say with confidence that btwn the two of them, they have maybe totally ruined 3-4 books, two of those books were cheapy paperback books that were less than $2 each and two of them were books with TONS of flaps that were given to us as gifts (I would never have gotten those books on my own, they were just too delicate for toddlers), one of them was an annoying book anyway, so I was happy to toss it, lol. My 3.5 yr old is actually really careful about his books, b/c I remind him to be gentle.

[kayte]

Vernon Library SUpply carries lots of options for protecting a book jacket. Here is a link to their main site

http://www.vernonlibrarysupplies.com/cgi-bin/vernlib.cgi

Here is a link to what I have used in my classroom for protecting hardbacks

http://tinyurl.com/3btwku

But there are other options too so have a look around the site.

I have ordered from them several times are easy to work with.

HTH