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Get Your Squishmallows Out of My Kid’s Scholastic Book Catalogue

The fairs used to encourage children to read. Now they make them want to shop 

Ask a millennial about their childhood book fairs and watch their eyes mist over with tender nostalgia. I’m no different. Unlike candy or television, books were something my parents encouraged me to devour in unlimited quantities, and I can still recall the frenzied thrill of my school’s annual Scholastic book fair. The order form elicited a buzz of permissible, wholesome consumerism, and I loved the freedom of pencilling in my choices after careful deliberation: Animorphs, Scott O’Dell novels, R. L. Stine series that would give me nightmares for weeks.

The ubiquity of this nostalgic millennial touchstone persists in the broad and enduring reach of Scholastic: nearly 9,000 fairs were hosted in Canadian schools last year. According to a company spokesperson, around 88 percent of public elementary schools in Canada host book fairs—when gyms or libraries become pop-up bookstores for students—or book clubs, where books are ordered from a catalogue. Participating schools receive Scholastic credits based on sales, which allow them to buy books and resources for their libraries—no small carrot as education budgets dwindle in school districts across the country. (In Vancouver, where I live, base funding for schools has declined by 20 percent since 2013/14, while per-student funding has declined 16 percent.)

So it gives me no pleasure to report that Scholastic catalogues have become, actually, pretty terrible. The first time my daughter brought one home—a catalogue she had already pored over in class, hopefully selecting items she now begged us to buy for her—I was appalled. A Squishmallows book? You mean, a multi-page advertisement for pillows with faces? Many of the books were extensions of toy or TV franchises—Lego, Pokémon, Paw Patrol—that seemed to be marketing themselves not on the merits of imaginative storytelling but on their proximity to more stimulating entertainments, in the same way my kids are suddenly excited by toothpaste if the tube is adorned with KPop Demon Hunters.

“I remember being so stoked about the catalogue, which had tiny little images of the book covers,” says Erin Boniferro, who runs a bookshop and art studio in Vancouver called Collage Collage. “I remember checking off the boxes of the books that I wanted and then reusing the catalogues to make Barbie books, like little books for my dolls.” So it pains her to see the catalogue’s transformation. “It’s hard for a regular, wonderful book to compete against the branded things at a certain time in a child’s life,” she says. (By email, a spokesperson from Scholastic wrote that book fairs and flyers “focus on offering a broad range of books that appeal to diverse interests, ages, and reading levels,” in both English and French.)

And yet, as a retailer, Boniferro recognizes the necessary concessions that businesses need to make to survive. Anyone who has walked into a Chapters in the past few years has probably walked past throw pillows, cookware, and vibrators on their way to an actual bookshelf. Kids want anything with Spider-Man on it; they love keychains and stickers. “That’s the part that breaks my heart,” says Boniferro. “Because we still want to raise the money, and the only way we can think to do that now is by supplementing with other things........

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