Okay, y’all are inspiring me. I began teaching second grade last year, and the Scholastic Book Club was one of the things I let slide (trying to get everything else organized was plenty). This year I’ve been thinking about getting it up and running, but haven’t done so yet–but these tales of nostalgia are encouraging me to get off my ass and distribute the 4-page pamphlets to my kids this week.
Daniel
sigh Oh, how I wanted to order books from those booklets–but my mom was way too practical. She would point out that we could get all those books at the library and our house was overflowing with books anyway and most of the offerings were junk. All true, but I still coveted a book order. I think she let me get something a few times, but mostly, when all those orders of books came in and everyone got a little rubber-banded stack of paperbacks, I was out of luck.
I probably bought a poster or two. And my library got Dynamite–remember the weird style it was illustrated in, and the page of Bummers?
Damn, does this thread take me back! I definitely remember ordering from that catalog/flyer and then the thrill I’d get when the teacher walked into the room with all those books!
I LOVED “Strangely Enough!” Still have it, too. Some of those stories still creep me out a bit.
“Dynamite” magazine rocked; I still remember the Star Wars cover with the Stormtrooper.
Wow, to think my thread may have a purpose beyond just nostalgia.
Thanks, Daniel.
Since I have no kids and don’t know the ins and outs of grade school these days, uh, does SBS still publish Dynamite. Probably with today’s slang, it’d be called Da Bomb or something. 
Here’s one of the few altruistic things I’ve ever done. As I mentioned, I rarely got more than one or two books – rural Kentucky, we were po’, boohoo, boohoo. But no matter how bad off you are, there’s always somebody in direr straits. One young kid in about the fourth grade never ordered any – simply too poor to afford the thirty-five or so cents. Kid was a huge horse nut, and one day after the books came in, he borrowed my copy of one of the “‘HORSE’ of Chincoteague” books (iirc). A while later, I noticed that instead of reading it, he was hastily transcribing the entire book into a notebook. Said he was making himself a copy to read (YES, YES, I know it’s illegal, but this was a ten-year-old!). Felt so bad, I told him after I read it, he could have it, so stop cramping your hand up scribbling furiously. Haven’t seen him since school, but I hope he still has it, passed it on, etc., etc. My luck he turned into a murderer and reads books on horses in prison, but that is just me being cynical.
Sir Rhosis
I meant to respond to part of your post last night. At our elementary school, Book Fair is one of the most exciting parts of the school year. The kids get so wound up. Ours always starts on a Monday, but we put on a “sneak preview” the Friday before and let the teachers bring their classes in for a few minutes at a time so the kids can look around. Almost all the kids bring pencil and paper and write down what they want to get. By the time Monday rolls around, we have a line snaking through the library after the buses drop the kids off. A lot of kids save up their allowances and birthday money to buy books. The last two days of the Book Fair coincide with “Grandparents’ Days,” and the kids can always con Grandma and Grandpa into buying more books. It’s an exhausting but awesome week. 
As an English teacher who religiously passes out these flyers once a month, I can say that most of the kids latch on to these things and devour them cover to cover. There’s really no way to pass these things out and keep teaching, because you have lost your audience, so I indulge myself for a few minutes, pointing out favorites, and encouraging certain kids to go for books I know they’ll enjoy. And when my kids were small, I would order books also, and squirrel them away for their bday/Christmas/etc. The oldest dd loved those horse books where you also got a FREE necklace with it;)
Ahhhhhh yeah…
Those newsprint-catalogs, something to look through and look through and look through. They had all sorts of posters besides the iconic cat.
Didn’t Dynamite magazine give way to Banannas or something like that after a certain grade? Or was that Ranger Rick?
Upthread mentioned going to school with that manilla envelope carefully marked out and holding coins. Not only do I have a hard time remembering cash itself (thank ye Internet), but buying books with coins?!
We have kids bringing in Ziplocs packed with change! I could do without having to count all that. 
Thanks so much for this thread. I remember so well. I bought hundreds and hundreds of Scholastic books, and many are still in my attic somewhere. Old Bones, you bet. *The Greyhound *is right now on the floor of my guest room, waiting for me to find shelf space for it. The Moonstone. *Encyclopedia Brown, Madame Curie, Light a Single Candle, Snow Treasure. * One good thing I can say about my father, he never questioned me about book money.
I’ll probably be thinking all evening about this. (Now I belong to QPB.)
He’d disagree with you. During the '50s he and Randall Garrett wrote a large chunk of the content of the lower class digests. It’s a great credit to him that he started writing such excellent novels in the '60s and '70s.
Anyhow, the book in question was called “Revolt on Alpha C” and included dinosaurs. It was his first novel (though it was a bit short for that designation) and even at 11 I knew it wasn’t very good. It was originally published in 1955, during the height of the hack period.
The best days in the school year were the days I walked into the classroom and saw the big cardboard box from Scholastic sitting on the teacher’s desk. Judy Blume, Marilyn Sachs, Beverly Cleary, The Girls of Canby Hall, Encyclopedia Brown, Choose Your Own Adventure, any horror books I could get my hands on - book orders made going to school worthwhile. I was bitterly disappointed when I got to 7th grade and our Language Arts teacher told us that with 7 English classes she couldn’t organize book orders, and anyway we were too old.
My daughter doesn’t get the chance to order very often because we’re broke, but last week I was able to send her to school with enough money for her chosen books - the complete set of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a Naruto book, and another one I can’t remember. I think I get more excited about her book orders than she does; in addition to new books, they frequently have reprints of books I remember reading. I could have gotten the complete set of Ramona Quimby books, for example, or Bunnicula (I love me some Bunnicula), or Little House books. They also had several packs of Newbury award winning books, old and new. And the prices are still very low.
Nowadays I get the catalog from Hamilton Books, but it’s not the same.
Bunnicula!!
I’d completely forgotten about Bunnicula! :smack: The Bunnicula series has what is probably the worst title pun ever: “The Celery Stalks At Midnight”.
Just curious. What do Scholastic books cost now? Say for a mass-market paperback.
YES! “Snow Treasure”–I had that one! Definite favorite!
Scholastic is still around with the take-home flyers. They do big business with physical book fairs that the PTA’s set up on school open house nights, etc. (I know this because Mrs. Quercus has run quite a few of these!) They also sell the posters, software, junk & knickknacks, everything Potter…
One of the warehouses that Scholastic stocks the bookfairs out of is (or was) located not too far from St. Louis, in the Fenton area. When my daughter was in grade school, one of her teachers let some of the parents know about the annual end-of-the-school- year-clear-the-warehouse sale they would have. It was supposed to be for teachers only, but they never checked IDs and savvy parents could load up.
It was incredible. They would have EVERYTHING they used to have at bookfairs at 50% and MORE off. This included regular edition hardcover ‘adult’ books, posters, software, funny pencils, small toys, and kids books at cut-rate prices. You went through the place with a shopping cart and picked out what you wanted from crates and shelves. There was always a clearance section with ‘all you can fit in the bag’ for a really low price, $5 or so.
And the wonderful, wonderful smell of the place…new books. Scholastic books.
Not sure if they’re still doing that or not, but it was always great fun.
Oh, Scholastic! I had tons of BabySitters Club, Sleepover Friends, and Beverly Cleary and who knows what all from them. I also remember ordering To Kill a Mockingbird and reading it in 8th grade. Now years later, it’s still one of my favorite books of all time.
I remember that I couldn’t wait to get home to read them, so I’d read on the bus going home, and I’d end up getting horribly nauseaous. (I used to get carsick if I read in a moving vehicle).
My only complaint was that a lot of the times, the books weren’t of the greatest quality-physically, that is-and tended to fall apart easily.
As a Kid that was one of my fav. times of school- getting those little book lists and buying books (because my parents loved it when i read, so i could always get 2-3 books).
I now have a HUGE collection of Goosebumps, Boxcar children, and several other “fun” books (Like joke books, and those “packaged sets” -that’d give me like 4 books about mummies or vampires or werewolves at a discount) that I LOVED to read from 2nd grade to 5th grade in the '90s.
Man, that stuff was awesome…
I hope they still do that now, but i’m not really sure.
Goosebumps came after my time-I used to read R.L.'s “Fear Street” books.
Oh man! FEAR STREET! That was my first real introduction to “horror” categorized books, and I LOVED them. From there I got into Tales from Fear Street, but then realized it was just watered down FS books (i loved the series about the psychopathic murdering cheerleader), and so then I went on to Stephen King and the “harder” stuff. (Cujo was my first one in the fourth Grade).
After that… good times.