BRENDA POWER’S COLUMN

AFTER I’d finished selecting the schoolbooks from my son’s list, on an online order form, I clicked on the ‘checkout’ icon for my grand total. It came to €272, but at least delivery was free. I might have saved a few euros if queued at one of the school supply shops in the hope of picking up the odd second-hand copy, but that’s always a long shot.

The booklists change from year to year, for a start, while the shops are extremely choosy about the books they’ll accept, and they rarely give you more than two or three euro for a book that will set you back €20 or €30 anyway.

Like most parents, I’ve given up hauling bags of nearly new textbooks to the school supply shops to sell because you’d be lucky to off-load more than a couple. The rest you bring home and put straight into the green bin. The charity shops won’t take them – I’ve checked.

Three years ago, I filled two green wheelie bins with schoolbooks; this year, after the annual fruitless search for anything that could be reused by either of my two secondary-school children (result: not a single book), I could fill another recycling bin. I reckon I’m throwing out €1,000 worth of books, bought for three children over the past three years.

So since nothing can be re-used, and second-hand books are rarely available because the lists keep changing, there’s nothing for it but to take out your credit card and pay up. A survey by Barnardos last year estimated that secondary school books cost around €275 per child per year, so at €272 for my son’s list alone, I reckoned I was doing well. And, as I said, delivery was free.

I was about to click ‘pay’, though, when I noticed an optional extra service that wasn’t free. For just one euro per copy, I could have the books covered in sheets of clear plastic. You’d think that since I was in the process of forking out almost €300 for the contents of next August’s green wheelie bins, I’d have been beyond outrage or indignation by that stage. But how did this single line about book covering infuriate me? Let me count the ways.

Book covering, for a start, should be the pupil’s job. From as early as I can remember, your new school books were your own responsibility. And as soon as you were old enough to manage a scissors and a roll of Sellotape, you covered them yourself. Since most of our books were second-hand, covering them made them look new. And it also meant you could put your own stamp on them, and write your name and age and class on the brand-new cover in all the colours of your brand-new set of ‘magic markers’.

Because, for another thing, book covers were almost never plastic. Some show-lot offs used a material called ‘contact’, a sticky-backed plastic usually patterned with wood effect that their parents had left after lining shelves. You couldn’t write your name on it, though, and you couldn’t peel it off, and so all future users were stuck with somebody else’s parents’ dodgy taste in kitchen makeovers.

Brown paper was also considered a bit posh. No, the book cover of choice, for most of us, was wallpaper.

It was strong, durable, and cheap, since most homes always had a few spare rolls. It was usually hideous, in chintzy florals or ’70s browns, oranges and limes, and we desperately envied those girls who had pretty candy stripes or delicate pastels.

Nuclear

I was beside myself with delight, one year, when almost half a roll of gold and scarlet velvet flock wallpaper was left over and available for book-covering. It was like encasing the books in weaponsgrade titanium: I found my old Irish reader still in perfect condition in the attic recently, and I suspect it’d survive a nuclear holocaust. Much like the plastic, actually, that covers modern books.

For all the ‘Green School’ initiatives, for all the efforts to teach kids to reduce, reuse, recycle, they’re still expected to cover their schoolbooks in the very substance that’s choking our wildlife and polluting our oceans. And that’s not even my biggest gripe about book covering.

The whole point of the exercise, whether you used wrapping paper or wallpaper or contact, was to preserve them so they could be passed on or sold. So what is the point in wasting time, effort, money and miles and miles of plastic to cover books that will be dumped in a year? Why do the bookshops go through the pretence of offering this service, when they know better than anyone how pointless it is?

If every secondary school parent in the country is paying €275 per child per book, then somebody, somewhere is making a of money writing, publishing and selling texts that are not, for one reason or other, going to be reused. So inviting us to cough up an extra euro a book for plastic covers suggests somebody, somewhere is having a laugh. As I was tipping the books into the wheelie bin yesterday, I plucked out one at random. It was a second-year workbook, neatly covered in clear plastic, and it was unopened and as new. Not one word had been written in, not one page had been used: I had been obliged to buy this book for absolutely no purpose.

Last year, in a feeble bid to tackle the cost of school books, Education Minister Richard Bruton banned workbooks which could not be reused. ‘Workbooks’ are basically over-priced, souped-up copybooks which serve little purpose other than to extract more money from parents. They usually came as part of a package deal with the main text and, from a quick look through the pile I’m dumping, it seems almost none have been fully used, and most only scantily.

So, if classrooms were managing perfectly well without these workbooks, scrapping them and just using the main text should mean a decent saving, right?

Wrong. The reality is that many publishers have taken the opportunity to reissue these titles as single volumes, increasing the price and, in the process, making all previous books obsolete. For example, my son’s booklist says last year’s Active Maths can’t be used because it came with a workbook at €17.50 apiece. They’ve now been incorporated into one text, costing €29.50. So his older sister’s perfect copy of last year’s Active Maths goes in the bin. Thanks for nothing, Minister.

And every year, in my 20-year experience of buying books for five children, I have seen those cautions against buying certain books second-hand – sometimes because they contained CDs, which were never used, or because a new edition had been published. One year, my daughter’s history book had been reissued because, among other minor alterations, the name of the President had changed. What about a simple ‘erratum slip’ or, crazy as it sounds, letting the teachers make the correction as part of a lesson?

For little more than the minimum projected cost of Shane Ross’s ‘granny grant’ proposal, we could provide free books for every primary school child.

And, since they’re commonplace in other countries, it has to be possible to set up a loan scheme for those expensive second-level texts. It would do teenagers no harm at all to be held responsible for looking after their books, returning them at the end of the year, and replacing them if they were lost or damaged.

And, instead of using nasty plastic sheets, they could rediscover the lost art of covering books in old wallpaper. I might just know where to find some bullet-, fire-, flood- and pestilence-proof flock paper, in a gold and scarlet velvet.