There was a week in elementary school when the library felt like the most important place in the building. The room turned into a pop-up bookstore and the day moved faster because everyone had the same thought in their head: ‘Do not miss it.’
For many of us in Generation Z, Scholastic orders, classroom magazines and Scholastic Book Fairs became parts of our childhood.
The fairs have operated since 1981 and have always been built around kids, schools and access to new reading material to expand our young minds.
The ritual felt even simpler. You circled titles with a pencil, folded the order form and hoped your parents would say ‘Yes.’ At the fair, you walked the booths, deciding what to spend your parents’ money on.
Scholastic built that feeling on a formula that worked with more than 97,000 fairs reaching over 30 million children each year. Recent totals include more than 55 million books sold or distributed while raising over $241 million for school and classroom libraries.
Those numbers look like business. In a classroom, they looked like independence. You could stand in front of a display and decide what kind of reader you wanted to be.
So when Scholastic Book Clubs launched in 1948, students could order affordable books from classroom magazines. Adults handled the logistics and kids brought the energy.
The magazines mattered just as much as the order forms. Scholastic produces more than 30 classroom magazines for different ages.
Issues would be passed from desk to desk, training us to read without feeling like a punishment.
What I miss is how excited my classmates and I were whenever the fair was on. We would look at the books and see what we liked and didn’t like, and were always looking forward to seeing what toys and pencil grips were there, knowing damn well our parents wouldn’t let us buy them, regardless of how cool they were.
However, that energy did not follow us as we grew up.
School days are filled with assignments, grades and schedules. Phones turned every spare minute into scroll time. Books did not disappear, but the path to them changed.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that in 2024, national reading scores declined compared to 2022 at grades four and eight, and also decreased since 2019. Those scores do not measure nostalgia, but they do signal a real shift in how often kids practice reading.
This is where the book fair memory stops feeling like a cute throwback. The fair made books visible, and it made choosing a book feel social. Reading became an event instead of a private habit.
The fairs also supported libraries and classrooms in ways students rarely noticed. Scholastic Book Fairs helped raise more than $241 million for school and classroom libraries in the past year, and delivered more than 1 million free books annually to under-resourced schools.
This is where the budget for school libraries and librarians comes into play. Literacy outcomes need stronger investment and staffing, especially where funding gaps limit what students can access.
I do not romanticize every part, but the fair did something that lasts and it was making reading feel like a choice you controlled.
That feeling stays with my generation, even after we left the paper flyers behind. We buy books online, borrow eBooks and follow recommendations from friends and algorithms. None of that erases the original memory.
The Scholastic era gave many of us our first proof that reading could fit into an ordinary day. A book could show up in my backpack and quickly change my mood.
If schools and communities want students to read more, they can learn from what worked. Make books visible. Make the choice real. Build moments that feel like events, not assignments.
A generation does not outgrow the things that shaped it. We just carry them forward in quieter ways and we decide what deserves a place in the next version of growing up.
