Obsolete Marketing Legalese

I suspect that some of these things are legal requirements in some territorities/states and it is not worth producing different packaging just for those.

Exactly. Just because the practices have been abandoned doesn't mean the legislation has been taken off the books. Some of these disclaimers are legally mandated. Like "Do not remove this tag under penalty of law." It's completely meaningless; it's meant to prevent any re-seller from making false claims about an item. Today, nobody would do that.

Apparently mattresses sold in the USA used to have a label threatening prison to anyone who removed it. Maybe they still do?

That's the tag I'm talkig about. You still find it on matresses, pillows, cushions etc. And, btw, it was a misundertsanding by the general public that removal of the tag somehow threatens one with being imprisoned. Any consumer was and is free to do whatever one wishes with the tag or with the item that the tag was attached to. The intent was to prevent removal by a retailer or re-seller of said item, since the rest of the tag had the "ingredients" of the item printed on it. Those tags are still there. There's no reason for them to be there, There's plenty of other legislation since that time which prevents a seller from making false claims about his merchandise.

Yeh, when I was a kid I imagined a clubhouse for us under the big pine tree. We were already The Secret Pine Club, and put on yearly Carnivals in our yard, the somewhat biggest. (We rented, the rest lived there near forever.) Well, it was mostly to be mine, mine, mine, at least in my mind. You went down a ladder to a room walled and floored with mattresses and pillows, with plenty of books and a refrigerator full of Hershey bars and cokes. (I was a simple girl). Those mattresses would never have had tags. How I got them down the hole was a matter that didn't present itself to my ten year old mind, and I have no memory of how I thought about the ceiling. Probably more mattresses.


On books, there is some announcement in some books about it being illegal to sell a book with no cover. I guess there are no-cover book selling thugs.
Me, I have two books that I hold together with ribbon since the covers tore, and I'd buy either of them if I saw them at a garage sale:

Claudio Magris' Danube, held with some silvered wrapping ribbon and
Agustin Yanez's The Edge of the Storm, held with regular twine.
Go ahead, sue me in advance.

I also got a book as a gift, one of those from publishers never meant to be distributed as it was sort of early re the book making sense as to organization. Was by a food writer I like a lot. So, in my cookbook cupboard (approx 15" wide and 5' high) I have this contraband object. Where the friend got it, I've no idea. Ask no questions.

That's done here (in Germany and other European countries), at least with glass bottles - mineral water companies do it with plastic bottles, too.

Well, 'thugs' is a strong word. But there certainly are people who will sell books that have been reported to the publisher as 'destroyed.' Here's how this works -- a retailer (say, a convenience store owner; we're not talking Barnes&Noble here) gets a consignment of a specific title from the publisher. At the end of a specified period of time, he remits money for whatever books have been sold and sends the unsold books back to the publisher. Except that he doesn't actually send the books back; that would be a major expense in shipping costs and the publisher wouldonly destroy the extra copies anyway. So what the retailer actually does is to rip the covers (or, even, just part of the covers) from the unsold books, send them back to the publisher and the actual book itself is reported as having been duly destroyed. This is standard procedure between retailer and publisher and this is how it's been done for years and years and years. But the unscrupulous retailer will then turn around and sell the cover-less book anyway, usually at an extremely low price like .25 or .50 cents. It ain't much but he gets to pocket all of it.

I don't know quite how the law works in the UK but here, in the US, there is no real protection for the publisher or author whowill now get no royalties for the sale of those specific copies of the book. The warning you read on the inside of the title-page of US-published books do not tell you that there is anything illegal in buying this coverless book. It is just a warning that if you, in fact, did buy the book w/o a cover, you just royally screwed the publisher and the author. It applies to your conscience rather than to any existing legislation that would cover this clandestine re-sale.

I figured I was exaggerating re my law fragility on that, as a buyer and new owner of a torn cover book since I did the final deed, tearing the last inch or two, done by long term usage. Let's say they were fried and shaky when I got them.

Thanks, I didn't know anything about all that.

So, can you sell a book bound by duck tape (aka duct tape)?
Self answer, probably at a garage sale.


So, like, where can buy great books with no covers for a quarter?

You know I'm kidding, but I've never seen those.

Second hand bookstores. Some still have the"buck a book" box. I was talking about the dear dead past when I said a quarter or half a dollar. Only place you'll find those prices nowadays is garage sales and sometimes a flea market.

I've been in a lot of used bookstores and not seen those, but I haven't been to all that many (well, very few) flea markets.
Learning still.

Hereabouts at garage sales and flea-markets, if there are books sold, it's usually half a dollar for p-backs, a dollar for hardcovers, more in exceptional cases, such as an art book. Those are pretty standard prices.

But (yourself always excepted and roger and bbb etc.) do people inNew Mexico even read? Do you have book-stores? Oh, yes, I remember now. Albequerque has at least one that I recall. In Rosewll, all we had was the drug-store counter with the romances, crap Westerns etc. Or the student text-book store at ENMUR (Eastern N.M. University/Roswell) which carried mostly just textbooks and maybe some classics.

Up here, Hastings used to have a lot of books, with records, CDs, and such. Now, they are pretty much a video store with lots of CDs and computer games. They've also got some books if you know where to look. There is a downtown book store, which turns out to be an overpriced cafe with some books along the wall. We used to have a Waldenbooks in the mall, but they folded. That leaves Amy's Bookcase, which is a very good second hand bookstore. Amy is a friend of mine, and her books all have covers.

It used to be (and maybe still is) that booksellers would rip off the cover (to show that the book had not been sold) and the book itself was donated to the library. The library in turn would give the books to people who needed books.

I hope they still do that.

I came across and interesting disclaimer on a product the other day -- fabric softener.

Apparently liquid fabric softener reduces the flame retardant capacity built into most fabrics and it is NOT recommended that softener be used on infant and children's clothing.

Which seems strange because all of the fabric softener commercials feature infants and children being swaddled in deliciously soft clothing.

It seems a bit misleading but I guess they have covered their ass with legalese.

Well, coincidentally, there have been some recent articles on how danngerous and harmful are the chemicals used to render something flame-retardant. Stuff you wrap around kids shouldn't have this stuff on them to begin with.

I read something about that!

I should have read closer but if I recall it was something about how the tobacco companies sponsoring the flame retardant science (because so many people were falling asleep smoking and setting themselves afire) and that the science might not have been in anyone's best interest but the tobacco company's.

Is that what you're talking about or is there more?

Never, under any circumstances, should one take their dog to a flea market.

I never heard that story, but in the local oil and gas field, nobody works on a well site without fire retardant clothing. So far as I know, it's Conoco/Phillips policy rather than law, but they're so big everone else pretty much has to follow suit.

We have a good one I can't afford (well, never mind): Bookworks. Often with signed works of local authors and next to the famed Flying Star on Rio Grande.

BBB and Butryfly and I and Roger et al are from elsewhere.
My immediate neighbors don't seem stupid at all, but I don't know what they read. An early neighbor took me into her house to show me her shrine to her mother. That wasn't a shock - a vietnamese/acknowledged later chinese/friend also had a similar shrine, but different, and we met him in LA.

I met some people in Corrales, and they seemed alert, though one is wacko to me, had (my view) a wacko bookstore.

All I know about Roswell is that my father was there back then.


Re people here, I don't know all that many because of my own mobility shortcomings, but, my eye doc at the UNM eye clinic is very bright, PhD among other stuff. Our conversations are great. I suspect it is not only me who looks forward to them, but maybe not, he is generally interested in his patients. Not to sound saccharine, but I've observed him for years now.
He's originally from Kansas.

I found the Hastings here out front and center Christian to an extent I'd never seen before (I'm not from the south), and expensive past that.

Amy's I can understand.