Meador Manor

Scholastic Corporation was founded in 1920, initially publishing a four-page magazine on high school sports and social activities which was distributed in 50 high schools near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It gradually added more magazines and then entered the book club business in 1948, and became a book publisher in the 1960s.

When I was in elementary school in the 1970s, we would get little newspapers called My Weekly Reader. It had originated in 1928 but was owned by Xerox throughout my grade school years, and I was familiar with it before reaching school age thanks to the Captain Kangaroo television show. Weekly Reader had a mail-order book club from the 1950s to the 1980s and was acquired by Scholastic in 2012.

In my later elementary school years, our teachers periodically handed out cheap, newsprint-style order catalogs from Scholastic, and we could circle favorite paperbacks which typically cost $1 or less, bring cash or checks from home, and weeks later a cardboard box would arrive in class with our purchases.

Eventually we graduated to TAB NEWS brochures for the “Teen Age Book” club that targeted kids in junior high or what would often now be called middle school. Mind you, we didn’t have Scholastic book fairs at my schools; those weren’t launched until 1981 after it purchased a California-based book fair business. However, our libraries and teachers always had us reading “Sequoyah books” sponsored by the Oklahoma Library Association.

I remember Scholastic’s offerings of Donald J Sobol books. His popular Encyclopedia Brown books for juveniles was rejected a couple dozen times before he could find a publisher, but since then that series has been translated into a dozen languages and has never been out of print.

I was a bit disappointed at their tameness and simplicity, so I tried his Two-Minute Mysteries, which were more murderous. However, they were like text versions of the old Lance Lawson comic strip, and puzzles interested me less than novels with plot, setting, style, and mood.

Recently I read a couple of old Scholastic books I found online, which are tiny drops in the ocean of content it has produced. The company now releases over 750 new titles each year and distributes hundreds of millions of books annually.

Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine

A vintage Scholastic book with a familiar cover was Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, originally published in 1958 as the third entry of a juvenile science fiction and adventure series by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin. I think I read it a half-century ago, but I don’t recall reading another book featuring that character, who was in the fifth or sixth grade. Abrashkin co-wrote the first five books with Williams from 1956 to 1960, with Williams adding another ten by 1977, although he insisted that Abrashkin still be given co-author credit.

I was unaware that the book was turned into a musical children’s album, with music composed by Julie Mandel. I couldn’t endure past the one-minute mark, but should you somehow make it all the way through side one, then here is side two.

Little did I realize back in the 1970s that forty years later I would be tasked with providing access to a Chromebook computer for each of over 6,000 students in a school district and the consequent teacher training, support, and logistics that would entail. Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine is now almost 70 years old, and my curiosity was aroused as I remembered nothing of the plot.

Among the reasons I was happy to retire this year was the rise of artificial intelligence and the many challenges it creates for education — after 37 years of integrating technology into teaching, it was time for younger folks to lead. In my retirement I had time to explore if that old book had predicted some of the issues schools are now facing after almost 70 years of technological progress. I found that David Owen already pursued this topic in a February 2023 article in The New Yorker, but I decided to re-read the book myself. I skipped the musical version of Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, instead borrowing a copy of Scholastic’s 5th printing from 1966 on the Internet Archive while also purchasing a Kindle version using $2 in Amazon Rewards Points.

The Kindle version was a digitization of a 1986 printing by Wildside Press. Sadly, that edition omitted the many interior illustrations by Ezra Jack Keats. Right off the bat, in the first chapter, text about a homemade pantograph was greatly enhanced in the Scholastic version by one of Keats’ illustrations.

The authors acknowledged at the beginning of the book their gratitude to Miss Terry di Senso, who had guided them through two of the computers from IBM in the late 1950s, and to Dr. Louis Robinson, IBM’s manager of mathematics and applications, for reviewing and advising on the manuscript. They also wrote, “In all fairness to both Professor Bullfinch and Danny, we wish to point out that their position on homework is supported by Bulletin 1248-3 of the Educational Service Bureau, University of Pennsylvania.” Does such a bulletin, reputedly entitled, “What About Homework?” exist? The internet knows not, but later studies showed a negative relationship between higher homework amounts and student achievement in elementary schools, a small benefit to some homework in middle schools, and high school students who did 30 to 90 minutes of homework per night had higher test scores than those who did none or those who studied more than four hours per night.

Danny and his friends are able to speak their questions to the computer, and it responds on a typewriter. It editorializes a bit in its response, acting like a limited A.I. from the late 2010s. Professor Bullfinch explains, “The computer can reason…It can do sums and give information and draw logical conslusions, but it can’t create anything. It could give you all the words that rhyme with moon, for instance, but it couldn’t put them together into a poem.”

Well, in the 2020s we have A.I.s that can write poetry, compose music with vocals, and more. When I was 13, I had to create a poetry folder in junior high, and I judged my efforts to be nauseating. For your own health, I’m only reproducing the warning I provided on my folder’s first page.

For fun, I asked four different A.I.s to compose a poem about the moon while drawing elements from Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine.

Note the em dash in Gemini’s composition, which is currently a tell for some A.I. responses. Claude also commented on its creation: “A few nods to the book: the homework-doing computer built by Professor Bullfinch, Danny’s friends Joe Pearson and Irene Miller, and the story’s lesson that taking shortcuts with schoolwork doesn’t pay off in the end.”

About halfway through the book, one of the kids programming the computer to do homework comments, “You know, we ought to enter her in one of those TV quiz shows. We could make a fortune.”

Well, in February 2011, IBM’s supercomputer Watson defeated human Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a historic two-game, three-day exhibition match.

The book concludes with Danny realizing that he and his friends had to learn a lot in order to program the computer to do their homework. However, there are plenty of caveats with that overly tidy conclusion, and the end of the book is now rather dated. The Professor programs the computer to compose a sonata for piccolo and bull fiddle, and Danny’s mother laughs and comments, “It isn’t bad…but it isn’t exactly Beethoven, either.”

The professor responded, “No. It never can be Beethoven, Mrs. Dunn. No matter how intelligent the computer is, it is only a machine. It can solve problems in minutes that would take a man months to work out. But behind it there must be a human brain. It can never be a creator of music or of stories, or paintings, or ideas. It cannot even do our homework for us—we must do the homework. The machine can only help, as a textbook helps. It can only be a tool, as a typewriter is a tool.”

However, 70 years later, the immense datasets and prediction engines in A.I.s can create music, stories, and paintings, and they certainly can do our homework with us learning very little in getting them to do it. The tells that give away that an A.I. created something persist for now, but some of the A.I.s have passed the Turing Test, understandably causing human consternation, trepidation, and discomfort.

I had bailed on Mandel’s musical after a minute of Side 1, but I had Suno compose this little ditty with a similar prompt to what I had given the large language models. Jeepers, Danno.

Just this week I heard about 20 seconds of a beautiful song at the end of a YouTube video. I spent some time tracking down a complete version, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find it was generated entirely by artificial intelligence. Recently platforms like Deezer reported that about 75,000 synthetic songs were being added every day, but currently fully A.I.-generated tracks account for just a few percent of total streams on major platforms. However, almost 9 out of 10 music producers are actively using A.I. tools in their workflows, such as for vocal isolation, mastering, audio restoration, and social media promotions.

The Riddle of the Lonely House

Another vintage Scholastic book that caught my eye, which I might have read as a kid, was The Riddle of the Lonely House by Augusta Huiell Seaman. The Internet Archive has Scholastic’s TAB Books reprints of it with cover prices of 25¢ in 1961, 35¢ in 1964, and 50¢ in 1968, but quantity prices were available on request.

The book was copyrighted in 1935 and 1936 and originally published as The Strange Pettingill Puzzle: Two Mysteries for Boys and Girls by Doubleday, Doran & Company. The second story in the original book was Calista, about a century-old doll with a strange message in a hidden pocket of her dress.

I borrowed one of the copies of The Riddle of the Lonely House on the Internet Archive and found the book an easy and pleasant tale. Each chapter had an opening illustration by Charles Beck, and it included a nice floorplan making it easier to understand where a hidden room was located.

Seaman published 42 books for older children between 1910 and 1949, along with many short pieces for popular magazines. In a detailed post, Christine M. Volk wrote, “In many ways, Seaman’s books are as pat and formulaic as the traditional ‘series books’; in fact, some booksellers who specialize in series books call them a ‘non-series series.’ Since the characters were different in each book, readers did not have the same impetus to collect them all, as they did with the conveniently numbered juvenile series, like Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift. Nevertheless, most of her books had the same comforting familiarity: the plot frequently involved two ordinary young girls, often with a pesky, but clever, younger brother or sister, solving a mystery that they just happened to stumble on (usually in a small town).”

The Internet Archive has several of Seaman’s books, and Project Gutenberg has 10 of them. I don’t plan to read more of her work, but if you are interested, Christine M. Volk’s wonderful post about Seaman includes a detailed biographical sketch that draws upon the 1984-1986 The Seaman Log newsletter for Seaman collectors which was published and edited by Donald J. Summar. Volk nicely summarizes Seaman’s output and offers some recommendations.

Star Trek Puzzle Manual

In 1978, Scholastic published an abridged edition of Jim Razzi’s Star Trek Puzzle Manual, which was originally published by Bantam Books in late 1976, when I was ten years old, as an 8.5″ by 10.5″ trade paperback for $5.95. That edition provided readers with plenty of room to write, map out mazes, and solve puzzles, but it was out of my price range.

Later, Bantam released a more affordable mass-market edition. It was pocket-sized with less than half the square inches per page. Thus spatially complex puzzles had to be resized or modified, and mazes that relied on fine details were cut. While the 1976 trade paperback cost $5.95, the 1978 mass-market paperback cost $1.95, and Scholastic would offer the mass-market edition for $1.25 to $1.50.

Both versions featured Lou Feck’s splendid painting as cover art, which Bantam also cropped for the cover of a mass-market paperback edition of the Star Trek 4 adaptations of original series episode scripts by James Blish. I was excited to be able to get the Scholastic edition, but that taught me a lesson in economics when I realized how it differed from the trade edition.

The Evolving Book Trade

While vintage Scholastic books have some nostalgic value and they kept some works in print, I have no interest in collecting them, although I am glad some of them have been scanned into the Internet Archive for online borrowing and that some out-of-copyright original works are at Project Gutenberg.

The internet claims that electronic books have had little negative impact on Scholastic Book Fairs, since print books continue to heavily dominate children’s literature. While e-books found a permanent home with adult fiction readers, print books still reportedly out-sell e-books roughly 4 to 1, and children’s books are still mostly physical.

The mass-market paperback has gone extinct, and Scholastic has reportedly followed the industry trend of transitioning to trade paperbacks, which have heavier paper, higher durability, and significantly better profit margins. However, that means many of their books for older kids now cost $8.99 to $12.99 instead of the previous mass-market pricing of $4.99 to $6.99. My guess is that has priced some kids out, given that 44% of Americans have trouble paying for basic necessities, which increases the importance of free access to books via school and public libraries.

I’m glad that librarians in my school district host Scholastic Book Fairs and that children in our county under age five can receive a free book each month through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which is locally sponsored through the Bartlesville Public Schools Foundation. Reading has always been a big part of my life and foundational to my personal success and satisfaction. Scholastic played a role in that, both through the cheap paperbacks I could order and its publications like Bananas and Dynamite magazine.

When I was in elementary school, I enjoyed collecting and reading the Hardy Boys mysteries. I accumulated the “picture cover” versions, and by the early 1970s there were over 50, with a new volume released each year. I remember my excitement when #52, The Shattered Helmet, debuted in 1973, and how the annual treat had lost its appeal for me by 1979 when #58, The Sting of the Scorpion, appeared.

That one turned out to be the last of the books put out by Grosset & Dunlap, which had published the series since 1927. Harriet Adams, who with her sister inherited in 1930 the Stratemeyer Syndicate that crafted the Hardy Boys and many other series books, shifted later volumes to Simon & Schuster. So the Grosset & Dunlap era ended as I became a teenager and after I had aged out of enjoying the series. By then, I had figured out that its supposed author, Franklin W. Dixon, did not exist.

My suspicions had been aroused when I had noticed that the little library room at our church had on its shelves two old editions of #8 The Mystery of Cabin Island and #27 The Secret of Skull Mountain. Instead of blue spines and picture covers, they had plain brown bindings. The interior illustrations were different, including orange endpapers of a single scene, rather than the white multi-scene ones I was used to. I now know that those versions originally had illustrated book jackets.

My curiosity was amplified when I realized they were about 210 pages, rather than 178. I began skimming one of them and quickly realized that it wasn’t the same story I had at home. Nonplussed, I checked them out and explored their alternate unreality. While the books I owned had copyright dates no earlier than 1959, the books from the church library were late 1940s editions of books that had been written in 1929 and 1948.

I liked the older versions better, even if they were quite dated in places. They were moodier with more descriptions and slower paced, they had jalopies with running boards and rumble seats, although sadly they were burdened with some repugnant ethnic stereotypes and dialects.

I was highly skeptical that a guy still publishing new books in the mid-1970s had been writing them since the 1920s, let alone revising his own work so heavily. So Franklin W. Dixon must be a pen name for various authors, and clearly some of them wrote under fewer constraints in the days of yore. In fact, the original 58 Hardy Boys and their revisions had over 20 different ghostwriters.

I now know that the 1929 version of The Secret of Cabin Island was written by Leslie McFarlane, who wrote 19 of the books, while the copy I owned was a 1966 revision by Andrew Svenson. The 1948 version of The Secret of Skull Mountain was based on an original version by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, which was rejected by the publisher. Grosset & Dunlap brought in George Waller, Jr. to rewrite it, and that was his only contribution to the series. However, the edition on my bedroom bookshelf was a third version from 1966 by David Grambs. If you want to delve into various details, hardyboys.us is a great reference on that series.

After discovering there were older versions, I rifled through the collection of an aunt to see if any of her books were original versions and found the 1946 version of #25 The Secret Panel. It had different cover art than the 1969 rewrite I had at home. It turns out that the original version was actually written by Harriet Adams, who had taken over the business in 1942 when her sister got married. Harriet claimed for years that she wrote all of the Nancy Drew books, but legal proceedings in 1980 revealed that Mildred Wirt Benson actually wrote 23 of the first 30 Nancy Drew books, and the first 32 books had six other ghostwriters, although Harriet did write over two dozen of the first 56 Nancy Drews, and she provided outlines for and edited and revised many of the syndicate’s other books.

I didn’t have the resources back then to track down additional original versions of the Hardy Boys, and our public libraries didn’t stock the various series, which were considered unworthy. Once I exhausted all of the available Hardy Boys books, my aunt suggested I try her similar series, which were also Stratemeyer Syndicate products. I was willing to read Nancy Drew and the Dana Girls mysteries, but I passed on Cherry Ames, Student Nurse and the Bobbsey Twins books.

I noticed how Carolyn Keene was credited with both Nancy Drew and the Dana Girls, but I reckoned she was a fake just like Dixon. Decades later I learned that Leslie McFarlane not only wrote most of the early Hardy Boys, but also Dana Girls #1 through #4, and that series was then taken over by Nancy Drew author Mildred Wirt Benson for #5 through #16. I gleaned those truths at series-books.com, which delves into dozens of series, focusing more on the series targeting girls but also covering a few series meant to appeal to boys.

My aunt also had a collection of Trixie Belden books, which were a breath of fresh air in comparison to the formulaic Stratemeyer Syndicate series. The first six Belden books were written by Julie Campbell Tatham, offering more characterization and serialization, although after that they had ghostwriters using the collective pseudonym of Kathryn Kenny, and they became more episodic with quirky variations.

My favorite children’s series, which I discovered in the library at my junior high school, was Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, which boasted consistent high quality under original author Robert Arthur, with more variation after his death when a handful of other writers took over. Unimpeded by the formulaic plot outlines, deadlines, and low pay that crippled the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s ghostwriters, Arthur’s works were far more creative with stronger characterization.

The series began in 1964 and Arthur produced ten entries before his death in 1969. The primitive card catalog at my junior high didn’t have series cards, and the later series entries were shelved according to the various author names: William Arden, Nick West, M.V. Carey, etc. So it took some minor sleuthing of my own to track them down across the library. The internet now tells me that William Arden was actually Dennis Lynds, Nick West was Kin Platt, and M.V. Carey was Mary Virginia Carey. In Mary’s case, the publishers worried that a book explicitly written by a woman might deter young male readers, so they used her initials, much as Dorothy Catherine Fontana, one of the best writers of Star Trek, wrote as D.C. Fontana due to sexism in television production.

After Alfred Hitchcock died in 1980, the series substituted a fictitious Hector Sebastian for the investigators to interact with or to introduce the stories, and in 1984-1985 the first thirty books were reportedly revised to replace Hitchcock with Sebastian or, for the first book, a Reginald Clarke. The original series went out of print in 1987, with Random House revamping it with older characters and more action in 1989, but legal issues halted that revival in 1990. Interestingly, the series was very popular in Germany and spawned hundreds of additional titles, radio dramas, and several movies in Deutsch.

Judy Bolton

Recently I re-read the first of the Nancy Drew mysteries, The Secret of the Old Clock, which entered the public domain this year. The internet picked up on that once I posted about it in my blog and Facebook started surfacing posts about old Grosset & Dunlap children’s series. One post caught my eye: it showed the covers of the first eight Judy Bolton books.

Judy Bolton? I knew about Judy Barton from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but I’d never heard of Judy Bolton. A quick internet search revealed it was yet another Grosset & Dunlap series, but with olive green spines for its picture cover editions rather than Nancy Drew yellow, Hardy Boys blue, or Dana Girls beige, and a different shade of green than had been used for Cherry Ames. The Bolton books were attributed to Margaret Sutton. I was curious as to who might have actually written them. Did the ghostwriters include Benson, McFarlane, or others?

I was surprised to read that Margaret Sutton was a real person, albeit born as Rachel Beebe, who had married a Sutton and perhaps legally changed her first name to Margaret after her books became popular to better secure her rights. She wrote the entire series from 1932 to 1967, and despite it being published by Grosset & Dunlap, it was not a Stratemeyer Syndicate product.

Sutton’s books did not conform to the syndicate’s norms after she successfully fought the publisher’s editors over having her Judy Bolton character age from a 15-year-old girl in the first book to a married woman in her early 20s by the end of the series, while most Stratemeyer characters barely aged at all. Judy Bolton visibly grew up, graduated from high school, worked as a secretary, and by book 11 was engaged to one of the two guys interested in her in the earlier volumes. They were married in book #17, and Judy continued to have adventures while married to her FBI agent husband, although the editors never agreed to Sutton’s desire for Judy to have children. Sutton did manage to have the young couple take in a little girl for a few volumes. She set the stories in her home state of Pennsylvania, without naming it explicitly, and drew upon various personal experiences for inspiration.

About four or five million of the 38 Judy Bolton adventures were sold over the decades, with admirers praising the books’ continuity and character growth compared to the Stratemeyer Syndicate offerings. However, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were always big sellers, and Sutton was convinced that the syndicate pressured Grosset & Dunlap into eventually dropping non-syndicate series.

Since I had just re-read the first of the Nancy Drews, I decided to read the first of the Judy Bolton books for a comparison. However, The Vanishing Shadow won’t enter the public domain until 2028, and I wasn’t willing to fork over $12 or more for a used copy on Amazon or AbeBooks. So I borrowed an online copy on the Internet Archive.

Oh dear. I recognize there are Judy Bolton fans out there, and at least one of her daughters is still alive and hosting an annual fan event in Pennsylvania. More power to them, but I was anything but impressed.

The book began in 1930 as a manuscript entitled Melissa of Dry Brook Hollow or The Great Roulsville Flood. Sutton had drawn inspiration from the catastrophic failure of a concrete dam in Austin, Pennsylvania in 1911. That dam was commissioned by a paper mill and designed to be 30 feet thick, but it was built only 20 feet thick and lacking an underground slab to prevent soil seepage. Water seeped under it, the dam developed large cracks, which were falsely attributed to drying concrete, and a week of rainstorms led to its failure less than two years after its completion.

Dozens of people were killed and property damage amounted to ten million dollars. The madam of the town’s brothel saw the failure coming and warned the town. Sutton would put a flawed dam and a paper mill in her story, but she would have Judy’s cowardly brother be the one warning the townsfolk.

To satisfy the editors, Sutton changed her heroine’s name from Melissa to Judy and added a silly episode with the criminals abducting and imprisoning Judy until she promises not to talk about them. That subsequently makes Judy seem rather irresponsible in not adequately warning others of the danger represented by the dam, although it could illustrate a youngster still in an early stage of moral development.

There were other weird issues, such as Judy receiving anonymously a bunch of tickets to a spelling bee and dance. It is unclear why she would need to still pay for one or more of them at that point, why they would be sent anonymously, and did spelling bees often have associated dances back in the day?

At one point, she destroys a makeshift dam to restore water to Dry Brook, only to later find that will increase the pressure on the substandard concrete dam. The plot sets things up for her and some new friends to try to redirect the brook, but they fail to act before a rainstorm dooms the town.

A little cat is introduced and then lost in a side plot that contributes little to the tale. Later revisions of the book reportedly addressed those various shortcomings, but the lapses show how inexperienced Sutton was. In an interview in 1984, she was asked if she had a favorite Judy Bolton book. She replied: “I don’t have a favorite. There are some that I know aren’t quite as good as others. For instance, The Vanishing Shadow wasn’t quite as well written because I didn’t know about viewpoint; I’d never studied writing, and I’d shifted over the viewpoint quite frequently in that book.”

While Nancy Drew had a kind and supportive father who assisted her adventures, in this first outing Judy’s grandparents are off-putting and her parents almost entirely sidelined. Judy herself is often unpleasant and unlikable. She is mean to her timid brother, who is an annoying coward who undergoes some character growth only to have it undermined in a lengthy and tedious exchange with reporters about his townspeople-saving exploit.

The criminals’ motivations are confused, with a bizarre twist in which (spoiler alert) the smartly dressed guy with a sporty roadster that many girls in town want to ride with is revealed to be wearing a wig, pink nail polish, rouge, and penciled eyebrows to disguise his normally bald and ghostly pale appearance. Why he is spotted at one point riding a bicycle without his disguise is never properly explained, merely serving as a spooky interlude.

Some fans recommend trying out a much later book in the series, but that goes against the continuing character growth and chronological storylines that are the strengths of the series. While I disliked it, The Vanishing Shadow is still a better read than some of the many series books I read in my youth. Sutton did far better with it than poor Dr. John Button did in the abysmal original version of Hardy Boys #19 The Disappearing Floor. Button haplessly followed a bizarre 10-page plot outline by Edna Stratemeyer Squier, who shortly thereafter left the syndicate in the hands of sister Harriet, who had James D. Lawrence write a completely new version in 1964.

My own preferences are Three Investigators > Trixie Belden > Hardy Boys > Nancy Drew > Dana Girls, emphasizing the early original books in each series over their uneven later additions and revisions. If I read more of Judy Bolton, I suspect she would land somewhere below Belden, but I’ve no incentive to confirm that. When I need an easy escape, I’d much rather read adult light fare by Mary Stewart or Edith Pargeter.