When I was a kid, back in the early eighties, stickers were all the rage. We collected them and stuck them in our sticker books, which I suspect were just glorified photo albums, but the pages were specially treated so you could take the stickers back off without them ripping. (If your folks wouldn’t or couldn’t buy you a sticker book you usually did end up with a photo album, and trading stickers was a lot harder then.)

I just got my NaNoWriMo stickers (which are ultra-cool), so I thought I’d go buy a sticker book like I had as a kid. (Obviously all my stickers were round-filed years ago. Shame, too, because by now my smurf stickers might’ve been worth something.) But all the sticker books on Amazon come with stickers – and they’re all branded. Getting stickers with your sticker book is cool, but having a sticker book that’s branded to Disney or some other cartoon isn’t as cool – everybody’s going to think those are the only stickers that you’ve got. How lame.

I guess the time has passed for sticker books.

I’m tempted to look for a photo album, but I’m afraid if I did I’d find out that they come pre-filled with photos too.