I think I found out where my obsession with captioning came from. I have a bunch of these kind of cheapie paperbacks that they used to give you free if you ordered enough REAL books from that awesome Scholastic Book Order Form. You know the one that you were given every month in elementary school and you could order from a cool list of book geared right to your age level and interests. It was also a great source of English language books that were a little more difficult to find in Germany in the 1970s so it especially appealed to me and my family.
I was lucky that my parents loved to buy books and this order form was like crack to them. They loved the big information books on science and history topics and we got enough of those monthly that I quickly earned all the bonus credits I could. I felt like I was scaming the whole system for books that I REALLY wanted. Don't get me wrong. I loved reading about the planets but I also loved me a good book of stories about the Chupacabra and his goat blood sucking breatheren.
So every month I would get to choose from a stack of free books. I could get one or two of these caption books and a two minute mysteries and a dumb monster riddle book and the latest 'thorough' examination of the Loch Ness Monster or The Yeti. It was so great when the book order came in and everything was new and crisp. Then four days later I am was jonesing for something else to read because you could consume a stack of these in an afternoon.
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5 comments:
"fresh steamer" LOL!
Book Orders, another fond memory of my youth, back before Harry Potter, when you had to break thumbs in order to get kids to read and the only distraction that they had to peel you away from was the television.
I was always intrigued by the plot synopsis for the "realistic fiction" category which almost always seem to involve a kid with some kind of abnormality. An albino boy, a girl who visited a dolphin on the beach each day, something like that. There were plenty of "Junior Novelizations" of summer movies, and stuff that came with kits and stickers.
I think this is were I got a lot of my "Magic School Bus" swag and I still have my copy of "The Ultimate Guide to Spider-Man" on my book shelf.
Everything I knew about cryptids came from Scholastic. You look at the cost of the books on one of those brochures today and it seems outrageous. Lot's of computer related stuff and tween monster fiction. None of the goofy fun things I have so many examples of on my bookshelf.
Oh yeah! I used to read them also. My mom wouldn't buy me books, but I had a friend who's parents bought a ton from scholastic and I got to read 'em.
Hey Cal, I'm going to borrow the kitty-junk-collection one for an upcoming blog post, with credit and a link to you of course. It's poifect!
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