How to Re-label Ex-Library Books for Your Personal Library

We own A LOT of children’s books.

Those of you who know us personally recognize this to be, perhaps, a major understatement.  I’ve often thought it would make a fun experiment to clock how long it takes first-time guests to our home to reach this casual observation.  

“You have a lot of books,” they say.  

Yes, yes we do.

Library Book Sales: a bibliophile’s dream come true

With this many books, you’d better believe that many of them are purchased used.  And furthermore, many were purchased at library sales, which means they came with library tags and protective jackets still in place.

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When I first began shopping library book sales, I would bring the books home, set them in a huge stack in my office, and commence with cutting off those clear, protective jackets.  Many times, the library tags came right off with the jackets.  Other times, I had to scrape and peel to remove the stubborn labels.

Finally, I realized three things:

1. The clear, protective jackets are actually useful in a house with children (you know, the ones who read all those children’s books).
2. All that peeling and rubbing was taking a toll on my thumbs.  Ouch!  (If you ever want to glue something and have it stick forever, I recommend using whatever they use at the library.)
3. I DO NOT HAVE THAT KIND OF TIME!  

So I stopped removing the jackets and labels from all those ex-library books.

Despite our massive personal library, we do often go to the “real” library.  As you might imagine, it gets tricky to keep all those library books straight.  Which books with library tags belong to us, and which books do in fact still belong to the Real Library?  

We do have a Library Basket, which is exclusively designated for holding Real Library Books.  Nonetheless, those Real Library Books often manage to get lost on our shelves.  Weeks later, when I’m paying library fines and trying to figure out where on earth that certain book could be, Older Brother says “It’s in my room.  I thought it was ours.”  

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This is a Real Library book that I found on our bookshelf, hiding in the middle of our own books, while writing this blog post.

What to do?

We needed a system.  (I do love me a good system!)

Eventually, bright as I am, I decided we needed to emulate the Real Library.  We needed our own label to place over the old library label, along with a durable, clear label protector.

Label protector–that’s a term I learned in my quest to label our ex-library books.  It sure beats “clear, protective sticker thing that goes on top of the white label and is bigger than the white label and sticks really well.”  Which is how I described it to the nice lady at the library who fielded my “where can I find those” questions.

I spent quite a bit of time pondering this dilemma, and then researching viable options.  After finding no clear instructions online, not even amongst other homeschoolers, I now offer these tips in the hopes that they’ll be helpful for other bibliophiles out there…

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The Solution

All you need are small, white labels and slightly larger label protectors.  

Here’s what I used:

• Avery labels 5267 or 5167
• Transparent label protectors

Here’s what I did:

1. Go here to enter the text on the avery.com 5167 label template.  I just used an “H” for our last name and centered it to be visible on the spine of the book.  
2. Print your labels!  
3. By the way, I discovered something amazing during this whole process.  Did you know you can change the paper type on your printer?  This is huge. It could be the answer to my “why do my labels always print crooked, for crying out loud!?” questions, and will save me countless sheets of wasted labels over the course of the rest of my life…My printer doesn’t seem to have a “labels” option under paper types, but it does have “thick” and “thicker.”  I chose “thick” and it was a huge improvement!  
4. Use the white label to cover up the old library numbers.
5. Add the label protector on top of the white label.
   

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   Now they are clearly books from the Henderson Library.

Presto, change-o!  No more confusion.

Now, I wonder if this will help us avoid library fines…

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