How to Make a Book Mailer from a Pizza Box

If you need to mail a book to someone, and the box doesn't need to look professional, grab an empty pizza box, and you can have one in just a very few minutes.

Materials:
An empty pizza box that doesn't have too many grease stains on the inside or globs of dried sauce. Pizzas that are packed with a liner usually leave clean boxes.

A marker or pen

A ruler- yardstick is ideal, anything will do

Scissors tough enough to cut corrugated cardboard, or a knife

The book you want to fit the mailer to

To start:

In the first picture, I have placed the pizza box below a commercial mailer that we are going to more or less duplicate. As you can see, the goal is to just make a wrap-around cover, with two flaps that fold in to protect the ends. I work on the floor, since it is flat and large. A cleared table top is fine.

Open the pizza box completely- even unfold the sides. In the picture I have shown this with the inside of the box up. You will probably want to actually do it with the outside of the box up, so that later the brown side will be a plain outside of the box for applying the address. But I didn't want the printing on the box to be confusing to the directions.

Lay the book you wish to mail against the fold of the box bottom, at the middle of the box.

Using the ruler mark a line about ½ inch beyond the edge of the book, on the right- no need to measure it, just be sure it's pretty straight. (1) on the first picture. Now add line (2). This should be the same distance from the fold of the cover as line 1 is from the fold on the bottom. In other words, the two distances indicated by green arrows are equal.

Now add line (3). This will mark a section the same width as the original depth of the pizza box. In other words, the two distances indicated by the red arrows are equal.

Add lines (4). These are perpendicular to the others, and should be at least ½ inch beyond the top and bottom edges of the book. This extra width will give the book protection.

You are now ready to start cutting. Remove the sections indicated in the second picture by the large black Xs. This is all the material to the right of line (1), and the material outside of the two lines (4)

In picture three, I have turned the pizza box over, so that the imprinted area will be on the inside. Make creases along the lines previously marked. Doing this against a straightedge, such as the ruler, is recommended.

If the book is thinner than the height of the pizza box, you will want to add padding. I usually slip books into a plastic bag anyway, and this is an extra-good idea with a pizza box, in case there are any grease spots you didn't notice. Then pad the extra space with crushed newspaper, tissue paper or bubble wrap, etc. Now you can fold the flaps A and B in, so that the wrap around the book as you can see the commercial mailer would do.

Then simply wrap the mailer, or roll the book, as in picture four, to cover the book. Tape securely and add the mailing label. See picture five.