Stickers, stickies, babber - tools for geocaching

Stickers, babber, sticky - all nice terms for small papers that are self-adhesive. Geocachers in particular appreciate these stickers on long tours to quickly sign a logbook. Stickers, babber, sticky tape - all nice terms for small pieces of paper that are self-adhesive. Geocachers in particular appreciate these stickers on long tours to quickly sign a logbook.

There are teams or geocachers who use their own sticker with their picture or logo, just like other stamps or the ballpoint pen. But there are also tour groups that give themselves a logo and a name for the entire tour, which they then place in the logbook with a sticky note to save space.

Yesterday was official sticker day. Reason enough for us to research what this is all about.

January 13th, National Sticker Day in the United States, commemorates the inventor of these self-adhesive paper print products. The memorial day for the stickers goes back to a cooperation between the web portal nationaldaycalendar.com and the US sticker label Sticker Giant 2016.

Unlike in Europe, birthdays are often used as a day of honor in the USA. (In Europe one often orientates oneself on the day of death).

On January 13, 1907 Richard Stanton Avery was born, who received a patent for a machine-made, self-adhesive price label in December 1935. This laid the foundation for the modern sticker and label printing shop. The name Avery is still known today in connection with stickers. This company is considered a world leader in the industry.

Story

Without Avery's invention, the history of stickers and decals would not be what it is today.

In fact, self-adhesive print products existed before Avery's invention. As early as the 19th century, European merchants used adhesive price labels to label their goods. For this purpose, a gum was used, which, like a postage stamp, only got its adhesive properties when it was moistened.

And it was precisely the stamp that brought the next step. In 1900 an adhesive was found that was specially developed to be self-adhesive for the purpose of gluing. It was mainly intended for postage stamps. The advantage was that the labels applied with this adhesive could be used several times. Avery's later invention brought about the breakthrough that you didn't have to wet the adhesive surface to make it stick.

Today there are stickers and decals with motifs in all colors and shapes. The variety of motifs has become infinite. Advertising plays a big role here, but so does identification with a club or a group. What was previously used purely for business and factually neutral in the form of price stickers quickly found its way into the colorful leisure world.

Stickers and geocaching

Stickers have also become indispensable in the world of geocaching. On the one hand there are the official stickers with the Groundspeak logo, often sold by geocaching shops and intended for identification. Then there are the individual stickers that teams or accounts have created to decorate many a logbook with their team name/cacher nickname or to stamp the logbook. Here, too, there are no limits to the variety.

The Travelbug is a special kind of sticker. A beetle is often printed, but always a TB code with which you can log exactly this sticker.