Edition 55

My school wasn’t particularly huge, but we had an enormous courtyard,
painted yellow and green and red, designed to exude happiness. It didn’t
matter if you were a frantic parent trying to get your kid enrolled at a
prestigious private school or a wiped-out teenager trying to make his way
to the top floor: you simply could not miss the school courtyard. And this
self-appointed ‘happy place’ lived up to its name only once a year, when
Scholastic chose to set up its excessively vibrant and extremely packed red
shelves. And on these shelves, the very entity that had me pondering small
acts of theft: books.
I think it would be fair to say that I had an extremely complicated relationship
with Scholastic. As a twenty-two year old, I look back and see how sharply
these book fairs constructed the line between the haves and have-nots. Or
that the titles on the shelves weren’t particularly diverse, or intellectually
stimulating. But as a kid, I couldn’t care less. For me, there was no difference
between me and the girls in Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers.
Illustration : Tejasv, 3rd year, B.Des
Design by : Nishant Sharma, 3rd year, CE
The Aisles
of the
Scholastic
Book Fair
Anoushka Raj, 4th year, ENE
What made the Scholastic Book Fairs special was how carefully each title
was organised. As someone who mainly shopped in the winding lanes of
Daryaganj or from cramped whole-sale bookstores, the sense of order
in these meticulously arranged shelves made everything twice as fancy.
These books had a striking smell, a complete lack of dog-eared pages and
stiff spines that felt too exquisite for my fingers. They also had categories I
wouldn’t have picked out on my usual runs to the library.
I remember a section devoted to pink books, each of them excessively
feminine and containing obnoxious amounts of glitter. This was where we
picked out slam books and girly titles about growing up. It was a bunch of
Scholastic Pink Books that taught me how to give myself a pedicure using
mashed bananas or how to deal with a jealous classmate. And then there
was a YA Fiction Section, where I spent many futile afternoons trying to
convince my mother to buy me a Harry Potter box set to replace the one I
had. Scholastic packaged the books in a way that made them more appealing.
Scholastic made reading seem like a glamorous hobby. The days of the book
fair were perhaps the only times that being spotted with a book was a sign
of coolness.
And then there were the non-book items, the endless offer of colourful
stationery that they kept closest to the billing counter. Bookmarks shaped
like animals, stickers in every possible shape and size, pencils that wiggled
and erasers that smelt like perfume. The Scholastic Stationery Aisle was
happiness moulded into a physical state.
Now that I look back, the Scholastic Book Fairs were perhaps my earliest
lesson in overconsumption. Rich kids picked the hundred volume
encyclopaedias and the heaviest book sets. Books were a commodity, and
having the financial means to own them was something to be proud of. While
a lot of us used all five days to pick out that one book we were allowed to
purchase, many parents bought multiple titles, irrespective of their child’s
interest in reading. I chose my books with intent and consideration, but I
wanted to choose them with a reckless abandon that I could not afford.
Scholastic was, at the end of the day, a corporation. It was an enterprise
that sold only company-owned titles, but projected a humane exterior that
has characterised its reputation ever since. When I reflect on my time at
grade school, these book fairs stand out as some of the better days. Sure, I
couldn’t buy more than one book, and I could only smell those erasers from
a distance. But in those red aisles, surrounded by fiction and biographies
and manicure manuals, I felt at home.
DTU TIMES | Dec 2021 - Feb 2022 | 32