Just read the book, Mom!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My mom just got her Christmas package from my sister today, and one of the gifts was a cute book with all sorts of Grandma quotes. So my mom opens it up, and what catches her eye? The warning that “if you bought this book without a cover that means it was stolen after being written off by the retailer and the author and publisher haven’t gotten paid”. You find this warning in many books these days.

Now this book has its cover, so most people would just ignore it. Not my mom. I explain to her about how just the covers of paperbacks get returned for credit, just like we used to return magazine covers when I worked at JoAnn’s. She jumps all over that word paperback, because this book (which I haven’t actually seen at this point) is a hardback, though skinny, book, but inside it says it’s printed by Bantam Trade Paperbacks.

So now she’s examining the covers, very closely. She calls my sister to thank her for the gifts, and proceeds to read her the warning from the flyleaf. My sister is probably scratching her head
wondering what the problem is. Then she brings up the fact that it’s a Bantam Trade Paperback. She can’t understand this, but decides that, though the back cover is stiff, the front cover is softer (it’s lightly padded) so that must be why it’s considered a paperback. I’m sure by this time my sister is spinning around wildly trying to figure out what the point of all of this is…I cab hear her voice getting louder and louder over the phone. And my mom has yet to even flip through the book and read any of the quotes. She’s totally absorbed in this warning and why a paperback company would put out a hardcover book.

It’s gonna be a long winter.

2

Is your mom worried that the Returned Book Cover Police might come after her?

Give her credit, though – at least when she reads the instructions, she actually pays attention. :smiley:

3

Actually, she can’t have paid much attention, as most books have that legend for as long as I can remember. Either that or she doeasn’t read to many books.

4

Hide the matresses!

5

next year you can buy her some rubber wallpaper and some nice crayons. Watch out for the orange ones though, they’re a bitch.
:slight_smile:

6

She has saved every set of instructions from every item that has come into this house for the last 50 years. If you want to know how the green bean stringer works, she has the instructions. And the instructions that came with the mattresses, which she follows religiously when she turns the mattress (on schedule, believe you me).

The only books she buys are National Geographic selections and those wonderful Readers’ Digest 5000 Helpful Household Hints, Fix It YourSelf and Home Remedies collections, so when I told her the warning has been appearing for years, I realized that while I may buy and read tons of paperbacks, she has not. But being my mother’s daughter, I read the warning. Just not over and over and to other people.

Oh, and I still don’t think she has read any of the quotes yet. The whole book took me about 15 minutes to finish, but she doesn’t seem to have moved it yet.