# How Were Things Wrapped In the "Olden Days"? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [May 8, 2019, 12:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-were-things-wrapped-in-the-olden-days/833664 "2019-05-08T12:58:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2019, 6:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-were-things-wrapped-in-the-olden-days/833664/21 "2019-05-09T06:45:58Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > I wonder about when things were packing in wooden barrels. Did the shippers expect you to return the barrels, or did everyone have a pile of barrels in their store or home? Because it seems a really bulky way of packing stuff. I’m too young to remember cracker barrels, but I do remember bulk packing in hinged tins about 1’ square. We kept them for storage, but shops that sold loose \ returned the boxes for re-use. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2019, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-were-things-wrapped-in-the-olden-days/833664/22 "2019-05-09T13:38:17Z")
> [@Llama\_Llogophile](#): > > My mom used a lot of waxed paper when I was a kid. \*\*\* Flash of ancient memories go by. \*\*\* Oh, yeah. Wax paper. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2019, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-were-things-wrapped-in-the-olden-days/833664/23 "2019-05-09T13:49:41Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > I wonder about when things were packing in wooden barrels. Did the shippers expect you to return the barrels, or did everyone have a pile of barrels in their store or home? Because it seems a really bulky way of packing stuff. Kind of before my time; but I expect that people who bought things in barrels very often found the barrels useful (for storing various things in, and/or for shipping things to other people); and, if not or if they wound up with too many, I suspect they broke them down and used them for firewood. The staves wouldn’t be good for a long-holding fire like you’d want last thing at night to still be decent coals in the morning, but they’d be great for quick cookfires or for getting larger wood going. Small things wouldn’t be packed in barrels, unless you were buying a whole barrel’s worth of small things. ---
**Author:** ![Jasmine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jasmine/32/2964_2.png) [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2019, 1:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-were-things-wrapped-in-the-olden-days/833664/24 "2019-05-09T13:56:04Z")
I wasn’t around in the “olden days”, but I think I can say for a certainty that things were wrapped in such a way that you could unwrap them without a struggle and actually re-wrap them the same way because they were wrapped by human beings in the first place. Now, we have the terrifying, “Factory Packaged”. For example, when I order a new set of bed sheets for my queen sized bed, it arrives as a rectangular block containing the mattress sheet, two pillow cases, and the main sheet. I have never, no matter how hard I’ve tried, been able to smoothly fold all of that up and get the components back in the same plastic zip bag. It appears not to be humanly possible! ---
**Author:** ![ZipperJJ](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zipperjj/32/211_2.png) [@ZipperJJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZipperJJ)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2019, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-were-things-wrapped-in-the-olden-days/833664/25 "2019-05-09T14:05:21Z")
> [@kunilou](#): > > Tiny little things were sometimes sold in tiny little boxes. > > Before bubble wrap there was newspaper. We wrapped fragile stuff in newspaper. We could use all we want, because everyone had a daily (or at the very least, a Sunday) newspaper delivered, and newspapers had a lot more pages, and even if you ran out, your neighbors would give you their newspapers after they read them because everyone in the neighborhood knew each other. > > As for less fragile stuff, when it was small enough, we might try just putting it in a regular envelope and taping it shut. If that didn’t work, we’d use a corrugated cardboard box and use just enough newspaper to keep it from sliding around. Everyone had a big stash of cardboard boxes in all sorts of sizes, and if you didn’t have the right box, you just went to your neighbor because. . . When we couldn’t write any more addresses on the box, we might cover it with brown kraft paper, like you still see at supermarkets. Kids also cut the shopping bags to size to use as book covers. > > In my day everyone had pretty much moved to Scotch tape, but I can remember big rolls of “packing tape,” which was basically a strip of kraft paper with glue on one side. In a pinch, you could just cut a shopping bag into strips and glue it into place. > > Of course we all knew that wouldn’t hold together in the mail, so we tied it all up with string (regular thin cotton string or twine) and took it down to the Post Office or whatever UPS was called in those days. And they’d look at it, and if it wasn’t right, we took it back home and did it again. This thread is about goods being packaged for sale, but your post seems to be about people sending packages in the mail, right? It’d be an interesting reply if you are actually talking about shipping items from a store to a customer (like from a catalog) but I don’t think you are…? Otherwise, this is literally still how stuff is shipped between people in the mail today. I have newspaper and stacks of little boxes too. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2019, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-were-things-wrapped-in-the-olden-days/833664/26 "2019-05-09T14:17:11Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > we also routinely wrapped schoolbooks (which belonged to the school, and were supposed to be returned to be handed to the next class in that grade) in brown paper from grocery bags, both to protect them and because you could then write your name on and/or decorate the wrapping, which you weren’t supposed to do to the book. This wasn’t, at least in my school, an income thing; pretty much everybody did it. They don’t do that anymore? We did that when I was in school- they even handed out free pre-printed book covers for that very purpose- they usually had folding instructions on one side, and a combination of PSAs and advertisements on the other side (I distinctly recall that in about 1984-ish (5th grade), the book covers were warning about the perils of mosquito-borne disease like dengue fever, yellow fever, etc… which seemed both pertinent (Houston has a lot of mosquitoes), and fantastic (how many people got dengue fever in the US in 1984?) I eventually figured out that the best way to cover books was to use brown paper grocery bags turned inside out, with duct-tape reinforcement along the edges, spine and corners. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2019, 2:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-were-things-wrapped-in-the-olden-days/833664/27 "2019-05-09T14:40:02Z")
> [@bump](#): > > They don’t do that anymore? We did that when I was in school- they even handed out free pre-printed book covers for that very purpose- they usually had folding instructions on one side, and a combination of PSAs and advertisements on the other side (I distinctly recall that in about 1984-ish (5th grade), the book covers were warning about the perils of mosquito-borne disease like dengue fever, yellow fever, etc… which seemed both pertinent (Houston has a lot of mosquitoes), and fantastic (how many people got dengue fever in the US in 1984?) > > I eventually figured out that the best way to cover books was to use brown paper grocery bags turned inside out, with duct-tape reinforcement along the edges, spine and corners. I don’t know if people still do it, but we did both the Grocery-Bag-cut-open-and-spread-out as a book cover and using book covers provided by the school. Of course, you could also provide your own. Topps bubble gum in the 1960s had a series of “Batty Book Covers”, some of them depicted here: > **[Driven Batty](http://www.thetoppsarchives.com/2016/01/driven-batty.html)** > > I started delving into 1968's Batty Book Covers a few posts ago when discussing some Basil Wolverton original art used by Topps in that set... [https://www.collectors.com/trading-card/1968-batty-book-covers-wrapper-topps/-5172482021613460017](https://www.collectors.com/trading-card/1968-batty-book-covers-wrapper-topps/-5172482021613460017) [https://www.robertedwardauctions.com/auction/2018/fall/2590/1968-topps-batty-book-covers-near-complete-set-plus-seven-duplicates/](https://www.robertedwardauctions.com/auction/2018/fall/2590/1968-topps-batty-book-covers-near-complete-set-plus-seven-duplicates/) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-were-things-wrapped-in-the-olden-days/833664.md?page=1)