Fun in a Tube

Don't the best gifts come in tubes? Tubes are so mysterious when you get them in the mail... what could possibly be all rolled up inside there? So you can imagine my delight when I received a birthday tube in the mail. My birthday isn't for a few more weeks, so it was both surprising and filled with mystery... The mysteries included not just what could be inside the tube, but who could the tube possibly be from? The tube was addressed in handwriting I didn't recognize... and although I have two good friends in Brooklyn, neither of them have the initials BCJ... and yet, it couldn't be from a company, because what company could possibly be so fun as to hand-address each package and include things like "birthday girl" on the address?

So in keeping with my impatient personality, I tore into the tube, birthday be damned. And there was such fun inside! It turns out that, in fact, there is a company that hand-addresses their packages and includes fun things like "birthday girl" on the address, and that company is Book City Jackets. True story. When I was growing up, my sister always covered her textbooks. She would sometimes use the back of grocery store brown bags. She would also use other, less common materials, which I always coveted because I was not creative enough to think of such cool book covers myself. So I would copy her. So you can imagine my excitement at the three gorgeous book covers inside the tube. Book City Jackets has done an amazing job of taking the middle school practice of covering books in brown paper bags and essentially turning them into works of art. Aren't they amazing?!

Don't they look so pretty on the books?

And they not only have designs featuring different artists like the ones I received, but they also have ones like this, featuring the words "fiction", "non-fiction" and "favorite" (they recommend putting these on the approproate books for your guest room nightstand, an idea I love):

And for those of you who don't know, this gift is not only lovely, but also timely. I am in the home-stretch of finishing up my MBA, and smack dab in the middle of my last finance class (also known as "the bane of my existence"). Now in class I will not only have the stylish book covers to look at and love, but I also have a place to doodle Zach's initials in hearts. If only Book City Jackets had existed when I was in middle school. Thanks, Shannon. I love them.