I find even pro­fes­sional book­sellers on eBay send me books that are killed in tran­sit by grav­ity and stu­pid­ity. Then they bitch and moan when I say they’re igno­rant and unprofessional.

Maybe I ought to jot down what needs to happen:

Wrap the book in plain paper or plas­tic, snugly. This keeps the bind­ing from get­ting torqued, and the text block from open­ing inside the ship­ping con­tainer. If you use news­pa­per, this will stain the cov­ers. If you wrap loosely (for instance with a plas­tic shop­ping bag), the book will still man­age to open.

Do this even if you’re using a tight-​​fitting bub­ble enve­lope. Do it even if you’re only send­ing one book. Do it for sure if you’re send­ing more than one.

You don’t have to use loads of tape to wrap the books, or heavy kraft paper, or any­thing like that unless you’re wrap­ping a stack of loose pam­phlets or some­thing. You’re not armor-​​coating the thing, just help­ing its nat­ural strength sur­vive the inevitable bounces and blows and slid­ing that hap­pens in tran­sit. Remem­ber: books are made of wood.

Don’t leave any void space around the book(s) in the ship­ping con­tainer. Whether it’s an enve­lope, or a box, or a box full of envelopes, fill the space. Don’t leave room for the book(s) to shift around inside the package.

If you’re hav­ing any doubt, test your work by drop­ping the pack­age from a 2-​​foot height before it leaves your office. If any­thing moves, if the news­pa­per shifts or gets flat­tened, if the book slides out from between your Ama­zon pil­lows, if the sty­ro­foam peanuts slide out of the way… you’re not done.

If you’re using a frag­ile ship­ping con­tainer, like an enve­lope or Kraft paper, you may not want to use void fill. But you may need to pro­tect the book(s) from being bumped. Assume the enve­lope will get thrown around, lit­er­ally, five or ten times before I see it. Some­body along the way will pitch it ten feet or more, and it’ll land in a pile, and more heavy crap will be dropped on top of it. If your enve­lope doesn’t seem like enough to pro­tect the book from that, get a card­board box and cut it into a rein­force­ment of some kind.

Espe­cially if you’re ship­ping a soft­cover or mag­a­zine in wraps, stiff­en­ers are your friends. Review the pre­ced­ing para­graphs about get­ting thrown, stacked, and piled, and add bent, twisted and torn to the list.

Finally, a spe­cial word on pack­ing mul­ti­ple books: Bound vol­umes will do every­thing they can to kill each other when you stick them into a box together. Sev­eral times (includ­ing today, thanks to the newest bas­tard idiot) I’ve opened a 20-​​pound box that used to con­tain six or eight heavy vol­umes from 150 years ago, only to find a loose pile of shred­ded pages and some rounded boards. Boxes of books that get dropped rub the books together, and even­tu­ally they give. Before the box does.

And that pisses me off and makes me very very sad, when I thought I was buy­ing a big set of some­thing instead of a box of fuck­ing confetti.