This is a quick hack up of my childhood sticker collection in turn.js. It was in storage at my grandmother's house on Amelia Island, Florida...scanned Fri Nov 29th 2013. The stickers themselves can be identified from the copyright dates as being around 1983-ish, so I would have been 8-ish at the time these were collected. So the book is 30-ish years old.

You can navigate it with the left and right cursor keys, or by grabbing the corner of the pages with the mouse (not a very discoverable feature, if you ask me.)

I scanned the images at 600 dpi, did some touch-ups using the high resolution data, and then archived them as 1600x1200 lossless PNG. The images you see here are much smaller JPEGs, to fit in a web page. To get the idea of the full resolution, imagine a lossless PNG of something like this JPEG

One issue that was kind of annoying was how much hair they picked up, especially from my dog. Stickers are kind of gross in that way. I edited that out along with some other non-sticker-damage. Another issue that was kind of annoying is that the pages weren't actually all the same size.

My major observation is that there's not a lot you can do with them besides taxonomize them... put the puffy ones together, put the smelly ones together, etc. These days I would attempt to tell more of a story... or do an artistic layout. But as a medium it wasn't really geared toward that, nor presented that way to children. More like: "Collect, consume, purchase."

Sometimes whole sheets were given as gifts. Many stickers were given as rewards on well-graded homework assignments, which was annoying in a way because you'd have to peel them off the notebook paper and then try and get them to stick. Trading stickers with other kids was; I suppose, an economic lesson... a study of relative values of things to different people. I guess that's the only real education involved.

Some notes:

• Probably my favorite sticker, if not one of the high ranking ones, was the big Donkey Kong one. He was a quadruple threat: puffy, fuzzy, googly-eyed, AND large. These days I would give it two more points that he's carrying a woman with exposed cleavage and short dress.
• I swiped the sparkly purple circular unicorn from a store. Not a sticker store, but like...a Brookstone. It was a single sticker sitting out of place next to some random tech item. I figured (probably correctly) that it had just been gotten at a sticker store and lost. It found a home in this book.
• "Nuts to You" is kind of a funny thing to put on a sticker for kids.
• The AAA stickers, while they may seem like outliers, were actually much better made than many of the rest. They were supposed to be able to withstand weather on cars and such. I liked them.
• No idea who Jeff is.
• Many of the stickers still smell if you scratch them. The sheets were encased in plastic sleeves, and I didn't scratch them usually for fear of damaging them.
• The stack of pancakes always appealed to me, for some reason.
• The strawberry was notable to me for being one of the few photographed stickers... most others were cartoons. Same with the pizza, I guess.