Famous Jewelry Collections: We Used to Cover Our Textbooks in Grocery-Sack Armor

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

We Used to Cover Our Textbooks in Grocery-Sack Armor

Long before custom laptop stickers, we claimed our institutional textbooks using grocery sacks, heavy blue ink, and heavily shaded rock band logos.

News for the America we remember

The dull thud of a six-pound American History textbook hitting the kitchen formica was the official starting gun of the academic year. It was the first week of September in 1976, and the humid evening air coming through the screen door still felt like summer, but the stack of hardcovers on the table said otherwise. We had our marching orders. Every book issued by the school district had to be covered by Friday, or you faced the wrath of teachers who treated these aging volumes like sacred relics.

There were no stretchy fabric sleeves to buy at the store, nor would we have wasted our lawn-mowing money on them if there were. The solution was stuffed between the refrigerator and the wall, folded inside another bag. The heavy brown grocery sacks from the A&P or Safeway were about to be repurposed in a nationwide ritual of amateur origami.

My mother would clear the dinner plates, wipe down the table with a damp sponge, and hand over the good sewing scissors. The process required a certain mechanical precision that you had to learn through trial and error. Make a mistake, and you had to start over with a fresh bag, hoping the family had bought enough groceries that week to supply your whole class schedule.

You started by cutting a vertical line straight down the back seam of the bag. Then you carefully snipped off the thick rectangular bottom flap, leaving you with one massive, slightly wrinkled sheet of heavy brown kraft paper. You smoothed it out flat on the table, usually with the grocery store logo facing down so the blank side would end up on the outside

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