Quirky Life of the Noob Wife: How to Remove That Stupid Price Tag Without Leaving a Sticky Mess

Sunday, June 29, 2014

How to Remove That Stupid Price Tag Without Leaving a Sticky Mess

It’s the white smush of death.

A shiny cover. The smell of fresh ink on crisp pages that were bound just for you, just so you can sit back and read and weep and laugh and maybe snuggle under the covers and is that a cup of tea on the nightstand?

A new book.

Then you flip it over and there it is, that dreaded little rectangle, marked and barcoded and bearing the amount of money you shelled out for your new baby. That nuisance. That sticky mess.

That price tag.

And in an imperfect world where price tags are mercilessly stuck onto the book covers themselves, it is nearly impossible to remove this stupid sticker without damaging the cover of your book forever.

Life’s just not fair.

For years, I have been struggling to remove the price tags on my precious books without leaving that glaring trace telling me that something was once taped there by a bookstore employee. Sometimes, when the sticker is new, it comes right off. Oftentimes, I’m not so lucky. I either remove it in a flourish but it leaves an annoying rectangular mark where it once was, or worse, bits and pieces of the sticker remain on the book, haunting me forever.

Luckily, my MacGyver husband has a way of removing those pesky price tags without leaving a trace.

How to Remove a Price Tag and the Residue It Leaves Behind

The answer is simple: lighter fluid.

While the idea of dousing your books with anything remotely close to being flammable is tremendously horrifying, fret not. Just pour a drop or two onto the surface of the cover until the whole price tag is covered thinly. Then, when the liquid is semi-dry, you can now peel off that price tag like it were nobody’s business. When the tag is off and you’ve freed your book from a lifetime of tagged doom, the heavens will open and really, what was so difficult about removing it in the first place?