My eight-year-old daughter wants to enter a thirty year-old trivia contest-cum-lottery she found in the back of the 100th volume of The Baby-Sitters Club. I’m going to help her, because I’m curious about how long a New York book publisher, or its star author, might maintain a P.O. Box in Jefferson, MO to handle fan mail about a book series about an improbably successful small business enterprise run by a cluster of 11-13-year-olds in a made-up Connecticut suburb.
I’m lucky that my daughters made the transition from picture books and Sunday comics to YA novels relatively painlessly. I give a huge amount of credit to Dav Pilkey, Rick Riordan and Tui T. Sutherland (in the case of my eldest) and Ann M. Martin and her small army of ghost-writers(?) and graphic novel adaptors, for my youngest.
This is a very generation-specific reference. I was too old for The Baby-Sitters Club, which began publishing in 1986, but really became a cultural behemoth in the mid-1990s. My sister was a huge fan, and, yeah, it was basically for girls. What you might not know, unless you’ve got kids of a certain age, is that Scholastic Books rebooted the series as graphic novels, and is still putting out two or three “new” books per year. The new series, which mostly stays loyal to the original stories (although it has to make certain editorial decisions to shrink the older books down to size and to cut some entire storylines), is itself a launching pad for YA artists (Raina Telgemeier being the best example of a writer/illustrator who built up an audience in the rebooted BSC universe, before getting the corporate greenlight for her own series).
My youngest gobbled up all of the available “new” BSC books, and, given her age, was initially partial to the similarly-rebooted Little Sister spin-off. Then one day, she found in a Little Free Library a Baby-Sitters that was somehow over 20 “episodes” ahead of the “newest” book, and, even though it was just huge blocks of text with no pictures (other than the cover), she read it cover-to-cover and begged me to find more. (Hilariously, given my own professional interest in references to labor unions that get sneaked into mass media, that book was “Mallory On Strike,” the 47th in the original series.)
My kids know how to manipulate me, and finding shipping-cost-reducing deals on used book websites is a siren song I can’t resist. And now they know how to search Thriftbooks, Alibris and eBay and how to flag reasonably-priced “Good” to “Very Good” copies for me to “add to cart” (this is a mutation of the garage sale gene we inherited from my dad).
My daughter is now the keeper of the BSC lore in her class, enticing classmates with theories of what stories may pop up in the next few “new” books and offering theories of a Baby Sitters multiverse. Apparently, there’s a whole divorce and remarriage drama involving two of the sitters’ parents that results in them becoming step sisters (I’m picturing–inappropriately–something like the “key party” scene in The Ice Storm). These plotlines might not happen in the new books because a key book got skipped in the reboot, according to my kid. I explain to her that storylines about chickenpox or “stranger danger” calls to the landline phone in the kitchen get cut because they just don’t make cultural sense anymore. My daughter, in turn, is becoming something of a cultural historian from these lessons and some of her own observations like…did you know that they Anglicized the spellings and some vocabulary when republishing the Baby-Sitters Club in the UK??!?! LIke, the books are still set in Connecticut, but that cool new boy who just moved into town from somewhere in the southeastern United States for some reason occasionally slides into Cockney slang?! It’s a very odd editorial choice, but one that provides my kid with endless amusement. Likewise, she’s delighting in finding copy-editing mistakes. This one throws me, because in my head the 1990s are a halcyon era of robustly-staffed publishing houses with redundant layers of editors and proof-readers reviewing and rereading text before it’s pushed out into the world. So, when she tells me, “Dad, I think I found a mistake in this book,” the first few times I was expecting to have to explain, “No, that’s just how they spell ‘labour’ in England. Weird, right?” Instead, she’d show me, “See how where Dawn is talking here there are opening quotation marks? But then, the quote never ends, even though it’s Kristy talking now in this next paragraph.” Again, and again and again she finds these “Good catch, kid.”
Anyway, the contest is found in the back of book #100 (well, and presumably in the last few books before that, because it was in anticipation of this BSC centennial). That book, Kristy’s Worst Idea, was already something of a legendary joke between my daughters when they saw the title listed in the back of a different late-era BSC book. We made a game of “yes-anding” the worst possible ideas that Kristy could have been putting on offer: “Let’s Sell the Kids For Food,” “Let’s Join a Cult,” “I’m Voting For Donald Trump,” etc.
So, why not let my daughter apply for this trivia contest that she slays at? How do you send fan mail to a kid lit author who retired at the turn of the century. Is Ann M. Martin even real? Apparently, yes: she’s in her early 70s and chilling out in the Hudson Valley. (I do like the idea that there’s at least one author who was financially successful enough to retire in a part of the country that by all rights should be entirely populated with artists who sold .0001% as many books as Martin.) Martin, for all her generations of cultural influence, seems to be one of the great pop culture disappearing acts. Or, who knows, maybe she plas in a garage band with Melissa Auf der Maur.