smells like a 4th grade scholastic bookfair on a chilly tuesday in 2007

October 6, 2017 3:39 PM

"[T]the Scholastic Book Fair? That week where your elementary school was packed full of books and pens and erasers and you could just wade right on in and go wild? Oh, man, that’s the good stuff." Constance Grady, for Vox: The nostalgic joys of the Scholastic Book Fair, explained.
posted by MonkeyToes (53 comments total)

So much more fun than school pictures (though not as long lasting).
posted by Bee'sWing at 3:46 PM on October 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

I got a book about Radio Control Cars and a lambroghini poster once!
posted by drezdn at 3:48 PM on October 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

And the lows of being the kid that never, ever got to buy anything. Teacher in booming voice: "If you don't have money to buy anything, go sit in the hall. Silently!!"
posted by beccaj at 3:50 PM on October 6, 2017 [26 favorites]

I don't know that I ever had one of these at my school, but we definitely had the book orders. Every month or so, teachers would hand out newsprint ad/order forms from Scholastic, and I think another company, and I would have a big time filling it out. Then I would go home and find out what I could actually have. A day or two later the teachers would take up the book orders and the money, and in a week the books would arrive. The teachers handed those out as late in the day as possible, because no one who got books would want to pay attention to anything else.

And the lows of being the kid that never, ever got to buy anything. Teacher in booming voice: "If you don't have money to buy anything, go sit in the hall. Silently!!"

That is so ugly. I'm sorry you had to go through that. What was even the point? Aren't entire sales strategies built on kids gawking at windows and then going back to beg their parents?
posted by Countess Elena at 3:52 PM on October 6, 2017 [5 favorites]

"If you don't have money to buy anything, go sit in the hall. Silently!!"

Preparing kids for a future life in capitalism.
posted by Servo5678 at 3:53 PM on October 6, 2017 [12 favorites]

Preparing kids for a future life in capitalism.

Emphatically true, but:

My son's school is having their book fair this week - he loves to read, but I think I was even more excited to go than he was. 6th grade book nostalgia is so deep it might as well be part of my reptile brain.
posted by ryanshepard at 4:01 PM on October 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

I just remember this thing being a ripoff because my school did a fundraising rummage sale shortly after where parents would sell you books for a few cents each. Probably some of the same books their kids acquired at the book fair some year before.
posted by Space Coyote at 4:06 PM on October 6, 2017

I have really mixed feelings about the Scholastic Book Fair because, yeah, it's a blatantly commercial operation in schools where pencils stuffed with dollar bill shavings compete with books for kids' attention and socioeconomic disparities are on harsh display as all the free books in the library are ignored for the shiny ones for purchase downstairs. But I also have a real nostalgia for it that I can't shake. I remember picking up books like Holes and The Number Devil, not because they were much-hyped titles endorsed by book-recommending grownups, but because they were lying on the tables among hundreds of other books and looked interesting.

It was also one of the first occasions as a kid where I could buy things on my own. Not "parents stand and watch as you choose from these three options" shopping, but just "here's a room full of merchandise; go for it" shopping. We didn't have a corner store that I could just pop into, so the book fair really was only of the only places I could try out shopping.
posted by zachlipton at 4:06 PM on October 6, 2017 [11 favorites]

Ha, I went back to the school just yesterday to get my daughter her 6th book from the fair, and she kept begging for another.
posted by growabrain at 4:10 PM on October 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

Preparing kids for a future life in capitalism.

if those lazy kids wanted to get books they should've gotten a JOB
posted by indubitable at 4:17 PM on October 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

Seconding that it sucked to be the really poor kid but at least we didn’t have to sit in the hall. It guess it prepared me for a life of idly wandering bookstores without buying anything
posted by not_the_water at 4:17 PM on October 6, 2017 [7 favorites]

I just remember this thing being a ripoff because my school did a fundraising rummage sale shortly after where parents would sell you books for a few cents each. Probably some of the same books their kids acquired at the book fair some year before.

The Fun Fair! Where I bought fistfuls of 1960s and 70s Marvel comics for pennies on the dollar - and my introduction to psychedelia via musty issues of "Doctor Strange" from somebody's suburban basement.

I'm cynical as hell now, but elementary school? A golden age of (relatively) cheap, pure media pleasure.^*

Admittedly, I came from a solidly middle class suburb where the privilege was totally off of pretty much everyone's radar, so the nostalgia is obv. easier to come by.
posted by ryanshepard at 4:18 PM on October 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

Me and my group of friends would huddle around at lunch and carefully plan so we each got three books, but not the same three books. Then as we finished, we would pass them amongst ourselves.
posted by 80 Cats in a Dog Suit at 4:23 PM on October 6, 2017 [20 favorites]

In Kindergarten my mother gave me a dollar, maybe it was as much as $1.25, for the book fair and I just remember bawling because I couldn't tell if I could afford anything or not and my teacher came and helped me buy Clifford the Big Red Dog.
posted by Hal Mumkin at 4:41 PM on October 6, 2017 [29 favorites]

Then as we finished, we would pass them amongst ourselves.

P sure that means you have an FBI file now.
posted by furnace.heart at 5:02 PM on October 6, 2017 [8 favorites]

Ah! Memories of the Book Fair in junior high: a socially acceptable alternative to the cafeteria. For one blissful week I could hide in the rows of books, instead of trying to hide in full sight as I sat alone at a table. My folks gave me some $ to spend but I also ate sparingly to spend the extra cash on books.

I bought Ouida Sebestyen's "The Girl in the Box" at the Scholastic Book Fair in 7th grade. Not only was I entranced by the plight of the protagonist (who was kidnapped and locked in an underground bunker for the entirety of the book), I envied her not having to go to school. The Scholastic Book Fair was quite possibly the only positive memory I have from junior high.
posted by Elly Vortex at 5:03 PM on October 6, 2017 [5 favorites]

Mad Libs
Lamborghini poster, definitely. On a checkered floor with pink clouds in the background.
Hardy Boys
Choose your own adventure
How to fold 30 different paper airplanes
Babysitters' Club

My kid's Scholastic Book Fair is Monday.
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 5:57 PM on October 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

Lamborghini poster, definitely. On a checkered floor with pink clouds in the background.

I had this, with the checkered floor, but I think the background was black with lasers.
posted by ghharr at 6:03 PM on October 6, 2017

Growing up, I went to what was then the "poor kids'" elementary school so we had the RIF program. Free book! Twice a year! We had Scholastic Book Fairs and the monthly book orders, but I wish RIF had the funding for every elementary school.

When we moved back to my hometown, Kid Ruki spent K - 1 at the new "poor kid" elementary school (which is really awesome and is finally getting the recognition it deserves. There is a geographic socioeconomic divide in my town, like, literally train tracks, and well, you get the idea), and I was the RIF volunteer during that time. It always made me happy to see the kids so intensely browsing through the tables of books. Once they picked out The Book, they'd bring it to me so I could write their name inside the cover and then it was theirs to keep.
posted by Ruki at 6:13 PM on October 6, 2017 [5 favorites]

Oh man did I love that. My mom supervised all my books but at the book fair she just couldn't. My favorite was "The Farthest-Away Mountain" which had some real talk in it and morals that weren't just pasted on.

Reader, I still own it.
posted by corb at 6:54 PM on October 6, 2017 [5 favorites]

Preparing kids for a future life in capitalism.

For the first few years of elementary school, I attended an expensive private school as a scholarship student. There I was, child of immigrants scraping by on minimum wage, attending school with the children of the local elite.

Somehow, I managed to convince my parents to give me a few dollars to buy a book at the fair. But some kid - I no longer remember who, exactly - asked me for my money, and I - gave it to him. His parents could have probably bought my family for spare parts, but I had no idea. When I told my parents, they were furious. They told my teacher what happened, and this somehow got back to the other kid's parents. The money was eventually returned, and I am grateful that I was too young to understand the humiliation my parents must have felt.

I think it was the same year that I learned what "rich" meant and that I wasn't it.
posted by a certain Sysoi Pafnut'evich at 6:56 PM on October 6, 2017 [9 favorites]

This is totally alien to me - we had the newsprint book orders, which I loved and carry deep nostalgia for, but never any actual fairs like this. When I saw the headline, I honestly thought it was gonna be about the book orders.

Weird.
posted by Itaxpica at 7:10 PM on October 6, 2017

This is making me feel positively ancient--apparently the Scholastic Book Fair was started in 1995, which was the year I graduated from college. We had the book orders and I remember poring over them and picking out books to send away for. Now I am the mom and I volunteered at my kindergarten-age son's school as a cashier selling the books during the after-school rush last year. I'm totally doing it again this year, it was so fun. And I got to close up and browse all the books myself in the empty room at the end so I didn't have to stand there debating the narrative merits of Lego Chima vs Lego City books in front of other people. The only bad part was that little kids don't understand about sales tax and so I had to tell a few kids that they didn't have quite enough money. But they were all brave about it and since it was after school rather than lunchtime most of them had parents there who could be hit up for the extra dollar.
posted by The Elusive Architeuthis at 7:33 PM on October 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

And the lows of being the kid that never, ever got to buy anything. Teacher in booming voice: "If you don't have money to buy anything, go sit in the hall. Silently!!"

Yeah, that was my experience too and I was kind of surprised the article just assumes all readers share their happy nostalgic memories rather than a different experience.

We mostly just had the book catalogues, so no one could see if you were the kid who didn't have an order. But at least once they had an actual Scholastic book fair and I remember begging my parents to let me buy something so I wouldn't be the only kid who didn't. (In retrospect, I am 99% sure I wasn't the only kid - it was a pretty poor town, but it felt like it at the time). But I think that year we were struggling more than ever, so there wasn't spare money for books, and I remember picking up books off the table and looking through them with a skeptical expression so people thought I was just being picky about what to buy rather than that I wasn't buying anything.
posted by lollusc at 7:40 PM on October 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

The only time I stole money from my mom's purse, it was for the book fair. She caught me, though.
posted by emjaybee at 7:50 PM on October 6, 2017

There are a couple of independent book stores in the Bay Area that run their own book fair programs for schools, which helps solve some of the Scholastic-specific problems with these things. My understanding is that schools don't usually make as much money though, especially since Scholastic gives them a sizable bonus if they take their cut in products, which includes school supplies.
posted by zachlipton at 8:04 PM on October 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

I was NEVER allowed to buy books at the Scholastic Book Fair, or via book order, not because we couldn't afford it, just because my mother (the ardent life-long Republican capitalist) strenuously objected to capitalist fundraisers in schools. Donations were FINE; paying money to a corporation for the school to get a small cut was RIGHT OUT.

Which of course makes me an eager participant in my kids' Scholastic Book Fairs because *I* never got to buy books at them, but a dour refusenik when it comes to things like wreath sales and wrapping paper sales because BY GOD I'M HAPPY TO DONATE BUT I'M NOT GIVING MY MONEY TO A PARASITIC WRAPPING PAPER COMPANY. (Ron Howard: She was not happy to donate, since she thought schools should be fully tax funded and not dependent on parental largess.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:02 PM on October 6, 2017 [11 favorites]

This is making me feel positively ancient--apparently the Scholastic Book Fair was started in 1995, which was the year I graduated from college.

That's strange, I have memories of book fairs long before then. The catalogues, too. My mom and dad always managed to scrape together enough for me and my brother to get something. Sometimes it wasn't a book, though, but a fancy pencil or eraser or something.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 9:07 PM on October 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

Yeah, we had both the catalogues and the book fairs, I think? This was in the mid-to-late 80s. I think you could order books but there was also a fair. Oh the riches!

Ouida Sebestyen's "The Girl in the Box"

Oh god, that book haunted me and I've been meaning to look it up for the last few months. If memory serves, the protagonist never escaped, which is pretty ballsy for a middle readers book! In my googling tonight, I found this fanfic which suitably wrecked me. Having an emotional experience about a book I read 25 years ago in a thread about the Scholastic Book Club seems apt.
posted by lunasol at 10:19 PM on October 6, 2017

From the article "The company has been putting on regional fairs since the 1970s and nationwide fairs since the ’80s"
posted by lollusc at 10:29 PM on October 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

We never had the fairs, but we got the flyers through junior high. I’m sure I bought lots of books, but the one that I remember was from the first flyer in 7th grade (Autumn 1968): The Fellowship Of The Ring. That’s one that’s stuck with me pretty well through the years.
posted by lhauser at 10:35 PM on October 6, 2017

I really miss the fair! In the UK, we have "the book people" -- they visit companies and sell cheap books, maybe only 20 at a time, along with a few toys and other things. They bring in samples, and it kind of reminds of me of the Scholastic Book Fair.

I don't think I ever had the money to ever really buy anything, but that never stopped me from looking!
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 3:21 AM on October 7, 2017

No fairs when I was in school but I can still remember some of the books I ordered from the little newsletters.
When I was teaching I also passed out the order forms. Most of my students couldn’t order books of their own because of economics but I always ordered tons of books every month for our classroom library and for prizes.
When the custodian would deliver our box of books everything would stop and I’d open the box and do a little book talk for every book and then later on in the day there would be a flock of kids by the bookshelves checking out the new books. Nice memories...
posted by bookmammal at 4:55 AM on October 7, 2017 [5 favorites]

A friend recently told me last month the story of a book he desperately wanted from the Scholastic newsletter but his family couldn't afford and how amazing it was when the teacher privately told him the book he wanted just happened to be accidentally sent to his classroom so he should take it. He didn't realize until he was in his twenties that the teacher ordered it for him, and ten years later than that, he still can't tell the story without crying (though my crying at the tale probably didn't make that any easier).
posted by MCMikeNamara at 5:56 AM on October 7, 2017 [36 favorites]

Oh man those newsprint order forms. When I was in elementary school the Calvin and Hobbes collections were all the rage. We already had a few at home so I had asked instead for some kind of fancy pen and note paper set (I believe it was one of those multi-colour tip pens that you had to eject with a button and that in hindsight looked a lot like a dildo) and I remember waiting for that particular order to come in for what felt like YEARS. My teacher would wait until the end of the day and then distribute it all on our desks while we were at gym. I remember coming into the room and seeing everyone else who had ordered that pen and paper set...and my desk had a Calvin and Hobbes book. My parents alway indulged my book buying whims but I was not always a very grateful child and my dad got an earful when he came to pick me up from school that day. Sorry, dad!
posted by janepanic at 7:34 AM on October 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

My understanding is that schools don't usually make as much money though, especially since Scholastic gives them a sizable bonus if they take their cut in products, which includes school supplies.

Yes, exactly. The one I ran a couple years ago made about $1100 in money, and we had the choice to take $300-ish in a check, or $700-ish in Scholastic credit. The credit is good for books (which are terrible quality but at least interesting to the students-- and you can reinforce them with packing tape or contact paper and keep them going for a while) and overpriced school supplies ($50 for a set of cardboard fold-up shelves?)

Funny thing, Scholastic doesn't inventory the boxes. My eyeball estimate is that we had at least a quarter of our sales in theft, but apparently they plan for that.
posted by blnkfrnk at 7:53 AM on October 7, 2017 [3 favorites]

yeah this is bringing back a lot of memories. i read those catalogs over and over again. those books sounded really awesome. i couldn't have any of them. this is possibly depressing me even more now than it did at the time.

had no idea people were nostalgic for those things.
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 10:33 AM on October 7, 2017

For reasons I will never understand, my parents wouldn't buy us books. My mother let me buy a few Scholastic books, perhaps embarrassed by what the teacher would think if she didn't. So I grew up owning a handful of these books. One was a Beatrix Potter book and the other two were "Just Plain Maggie" by Lorraine Beim and "A Nickel for Alice" by Frances Murphy. The latter two were completely prosaic books that, had I any choice, I probably would have read once. Instead, I read them over and over. It's touching, though, to look them up on Amazon and see that other people also have fond memories of having bought them from Scholastic.
posted by acrasis at 11:02 AM on October 7, 2017

I grew up lower middle class in an upper middle class neighborhood because my family had some good timing and financial look right when we moved from Quebec to Ontario but meant that everything was really tight until the mortgage was paid down. Like powdered milk and apple juice lower middle class. I never got new stuff ever. The bicycle I learned to ride on was my uncle's bicycle when he was 10 years old and my father was a late life whoops for his parents so it was probably about a 40 year old bike. I had to deliver papers to buy my baseball glove. My clothes were my older brothers clothes or my mom's coworker's son's cast-offs. My family drove a volkswagon bug with the floor so rusted out we were not allowed to put our feet on floor (and when we got in the car there was always the shout -"Don't step on the running board!" -because it would fall right off). So pennies were pinched pretty hard in my family.

But one thing my brothers and I were always allowed to have was books and for me scholastic was like a monthly Christmas and I would get so many books I would have trouble carrying them home in my tiny little hands (it was probably just three or four books).

It was pretty awesome.
posted by srboisvert at 1:25 PM on October 7, 2017 [5 favorites]

5th grade. Garage sale down the block. Science fiction paperbacks 20 for a dollar. I spent the two bucks I had, and then went running home to beg Mom for an advance on my allowance. Bought every book they had. Several hundred. Everything from Stranger in a Strange Land, Something Wicked this Way Comes, and even Slave Girls of Gor. In a lot of ways that was my education.
posted by mikecable at 2:01 PM on October 7, 2017 [6 favorites]

I loved the Book Fair because, always a lover of books, I hated libraries until I was an adult.

In the 3rd grade all my friends were reading Hank the Cowdog books and would play Hank the Cowdog on the playground. So during our weekly visit to the library early in the school year I tried to check out a few but the librarian wouldn't let me. Apparently, they had our reading levels on file from some testing and the librarian refused to let me check out anything below my absurdly high reading level. Even when I started to cry she would not relent! The same librarian used to also refuse to let kids check out a book more than once because she thought there was more merit in reading new things always. I just hated the library after that.

Enter the Book Fair where I was unsupervised with cash and a room full of books which I could buy and then read over and over and over without needing some random adult to sanction it.
posted by Saminal at 2:21 PM on October 7, 2017 [4 favorites]

In my elementary school, the book fair was always set up in the library. Those huge folding carts would be positioned right in front of the stacks.

One of my favorite memories was hanging out in the library during parent-teacher conferences and learning from another kid how one traverse the entire library without being seen by crawling in the gap between those carts and the library shelves. Also, it was during a wild thunderstorm and only half the library lights were on.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:04 PM on October 7, 2017

I can't say I recall any Book Fairs, although I do recall regular fliers, which is a bit weird in retrospect. I would have thought Amazon's cadre of penny book sellers would have undermined those sales, but I guess not.

I realize this story highlights my 90s high privilege, but one of the brightest days in my juvenile life was figuring out that the library's dial-up circulation system would allow you to not only view holdings, but reserve them. And it would also show you things on order, so hey, you'd see there's a new Patricia Wrede book coming out. No more browsing around the shelves of your favorite authors to figure out when new books are out, or if the next book in the series is even available on the randomly scheduled family library trips to the only library in town on the other side of the railroad tracks.
posted by pwnguin at 7:49 PM on October 7, 2017

I put a book on hold at the public library via some kind of a telnet interface to the library catalog, and then a bit later the library sent me...a letter in the mail to let me know I could come pick it up.

Sometimes technology develops one piece at a time.
posted by zachlipton at 7:58 PM on October 7, 2017

To be fair, it's not like I knew what an email address was at the time, or had one.
posted by pwnguin at 8:14 PM on October 7, 2017

I just loved going to the book fair. If I remember correctly, it was set up in the cafeteria at my grade school. I always had to look at everything they had before I bought something. That was only once a year or so. We did have the book club orders every month, though! It was so exciting when I walked into class and saw the stacks of Troll or Arrow or Scholastic Book Club flyers on the teacher's desk. The only thing better was when the book orders actually arrived - of course, my teachers waited until the end of the day to pass out our books, so I'd be sitting there staring at the box all day, just waiting to get my hands on my orders!
posted by SisterHavana at 9:22 PM on October 7, 2017

So much more fun than school pictures (though not as long lasting).
posted by Bee'sWing

I don't know about that, I still have books from the book fair like Catwings that, 30 years later, I'm passing on to my son.

My mom used to give me a blank check with the exhortation to spend only five or ten dollars, whatever the limit was. Part of the attraction for me was fantasizing about buying one of everything at the book fair, but I was such a rule-follower that I never went above the limit for more than the sales tax.
posted by lollymccatburglar at 12:26 AM on October 8, 2017

I loved to read but things were tight growing up so every Saturday I'd be dropped off at the library to check out a stack of books. The only new ones I ever owned, except for the odd Christmas present, were ordered from the Scholastic newsletter because they were cheap. A few years ago I was on a kick of rereading them and managed to find a handful, mostly mysteries, at garage sales and while it was fun to compare the details of what I remembered vs the rest of the story, they were never going to win any prizes for great literature. One I would still like to track down, it belonged to my brother but naturally I read all his books too, was about high school "hot rodders", most of whom were killed in a (very vivid) accident. It was one of those gruesome "message" stories. I realize that now but back then it didn't phase me a bit. On to the next book.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 11:21 AM on October 8, 2017

I learned early on not to ask for anything, ever. But sometimes I could steal enough change from my dad's catch-all to buy some books from the Scholastic catalog. Oh how I longed to buy every single book in the catalog! Many of my classmates at my (pricey, private, Catholic) school bought as many books as they wanted, then carelessly folded back pages, left them on the playground, lent them to friends. The few books I was able to buy - I still own some of them, and could probably recite some of the passages. Those newsprint catalogs - I agonized over those choices, and occasionally rubbed a hole in the paper erasing and writing and erasing again!

OT: I was only attending that particular school because my mom taught there, and got a deal on tuition; it was easy to pick out the scholarship kids. We stuck out like sore thumbs and bonded quickly in our well-worn uniforms and bowl haircuts.
posted by knitcrazybooknut at 2:34 PM on October 8, 2017

I just remember filling out the forms and waiting for the magical day down the road when my Dynamite magazines and 1976 pro-football preview paperbacks and the like would arrive. When my now-middle-school-age daughter would go to the book fair at her elementary school, my wife and I would remind her to bring home some, y'know, books, and not just giant pencils and other peripheral crap...
posted by AJaffe at 6:12 PM on October 8, 2017 [1 favorite]

So with Scholastic Book fairs starting to pop up, I thought I'd share a tidbit with you that I found out emailing with the actual Scholastic book company last year.

After another book fair where there wasn't anything in my son's reading level, I emailed the company and asked about their diversity and inclusion policies for disabled children and why my son got left out year after year because he's in Middle School but reads at a younger level.

Their reply was that the school or PTO sets up the book selection for each book fair, and they accommodate for the disabled population by request.

So if there's no books for your kid to buy at their book fair like every other kid in the school? It's because your school and/or PTO couldn't be bothered to think about your kid and following through on inclusion practices.

Now that's a thing you know.
posted by 80 Cats in a Dog Suit at 1:45 PM on October 9, 2017 [3 favorites]

80 Cats In A Dog Suit is correct! Whoever is running the thing is in contact with a salesperson for Scholastic who sets up the product mix. Sometimes they can meet your needs— it’s apparently stabdard to offer mostly grade-level books, with a handful of adult or YA and baby/early childhood books so that parents visiting have something to buy that appeals to them personally or as gifts, and to capture sales from visiting siblings.

They are very helpful and will do their best to make it a success, but Scholastic is limited to the products they have on hand...so they weren’t able to help me out with middle-grade and older books in Spanish, since they don’t carry those. (I swear I would have doubled my sales if they could have sent me some crates of John Green in Spanish.)
posted by blnkfrnk at 4:56 AM on October 11, 2017 [2 favorites]

Photo I took from my kid's Scholastic Book Fair this week. Nothing changes.
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 10:04 AM on October 12, 2017