School book covers

When we were studying in school there was a particular time in the year when there would be a flurry of activity at the stationery shops. That was just before the schools re-opened somewhere in June just before the summer vacation ended. The prime purpose, of course, was to buy the notebooks and text books required for the coming academic year.

Some shops were so crowded that there would be a queue formed to get the books. Other people would go all the way to Abdul Rehman Street (could also be known as the "Paper Selling" street) to buy the notebooks. These people believed that they would get wholesale rates for the notebooks as also good-quality notebooks (you know, the ones that don't smudge the fountain pen ink).

Then, there would be the ritual of "good" parents covering the notebooks and text books with brown paper and some of these would even go further to cover these up with plastic so that they would remain neat and have some protection from the rains. There were parents who would cover the books with some old newspaper or calendar or "glossy (centre-spread?)" types of paper.

That was during "my" time at school. A few years later the plastic cover was not seen to be as necessary since the "brown cover" paper would itself have some kind of "wax/plastic coating" which would render it to be water resistant.

Yesterday, as I was passing by some stationer's shop, I saw a heap of notebooks kept for sale that seemed to be wrapped with the brown paper. Nice job, I thought - since the parents have now become quite busy, this could be a time saver for them. But, on closer look, I found that the notebooks did not have any brown cover. The cardboard cover of the notebook itself was made to resemble the brown cover and had the plastic coating as well as a neat label printed on it. Wow! quite a bit of a change from our days.

Somewhat related: Union Book Stall at Dadar (Western railway west) used to cover any books that one would buy with a brown paper bearing a label and the name of the shop. The guys there were so fast that they could cover a book in under a minute's time. Sadly, that practice has now been stopped. When I visited that book shop to buy a book, there was no "covering" of the book.