Helpful Hints from joeeze: How to remove an adhesive label

Who hasn't been irritated by being unable to remove an address label or suchlike from something without wrecking the paper or whatever it was stuck to?

Most often it's the New Yorker that's the offender, since their covers are so consistently interesting and oftimes memorable.

When I try to remove my mailing label from the lower left corner more often than not I fail to do so cleanly, leaving a damaged cover drawing.

If I want a pristine one then it's off to Barnes & Noble to buy another.

Over the years I've learned a thing or two about removing these labels so as to cause minimal damage.

No, I've never attended a Flaps & Seals course at Camp Peary taught by friends of Larry J. Kolb.

All my knowledge was gained the hard way and may be summarized as follows:

1) Work slowly — painfully slowly, absurdly slowly. So slowly that you can see the strands of adhesive pulling like taffy before they give up their grip on the paper they're stuck to.

2) Work from the outside in at all times, raising the perimeters of the label circumferentially.

3) Peel the label back on the diagonal whenever possible. I don't know why this works best but it does.

4) Like attracts like, so use the removed label to adhere to adhesive still on the page, dabbing it over and over again, removing just a tiny bit each time. This trick was taught to me in Tokyo, Japan by an 18-year-old Japanese girl, long long ago in a galaxy far, far away.