Has the Scholastic Book Fair Lost Its Soul — or Its Nostalgia?

Critic Michelle Cyca opened a decades-old institution to scrutiny on Monday, arguing in The Walrus that today's Scholastic Book Fair catalogs bear little resemblance to the ones Millennials remember.

Cyca's evidence came from her own home. When her young daughter brought a current catalog home from school, she found many offerings were "extensions of toy or TV franchises" — Lego, Pokémon, Paw Patrol — marketed, as she wrote, "not on the merits of imaginative storytelling but on their proximity to more stimulating entertainments."

The piece landed as an elegy for a Millennial touchstone. Cyca remembered the old order forms and Animorphs box sets with rare precision. "The order form elicited a buzz of permissible, wholesome consumerism," she wrote, "[a]nd I loved the freedom of penciling in my choices after careful deliberation: Animorphs, Scott O'Dell novels, R.L. Stine series that would give me nightmares for weeks."

The historical record complicates the grief. Scholastic launched its first teen-targeted book clubs in 1948, with a Pocket Book program that let students order affordable books from classroom magazines. The fairs themselves began in 1982. Early iterations boosted Scholastic's own titles, such as the Clifford series; later eras proved crucial to the growth of YA properties including The Hunger Games and Goosebumps.

Franchise spin-offs are not a new development. They can be traced back to at least 2002, when the Arrow Top 10 bestseller list included a Pokémon guide. Even Animorphs — Cyca's own touchstone — spawned its own television drama.

The fair has also always carried a fiscal function beyond fanning a love of reading. In North America, it serves as a supplemental funding pipeline for under-resourced schools. A Scholastic representative told Fox 13 that book fairs have helped raise more than $2 billion for American schools in the last decade alone.

The nostalgia itself has blind spots. For some students, the fair was less a wholesome ritual than a class stressor — some children had money for Snoopy backpacks, while others could afford only a sticker sheet or two. Danika Ellis, a Book Riot editor and former bookseller, told CBC she has long been skeptical on exactly these grounds.

"We have kids who are walking away with huge stacks of books and posters and toys, and then kids who can't have anything or have a lot less," Ellis said. "If the goal is to celebrate books and reading and get kids excited… is a for-profit book fair the best way to do that?"

Cyca concedes the point in her piece, noting the program has always escalated "micro and macro inequalities." Buying books, after all, has never been the same as reading them — and the un-classy offerings of earlier eras, from Garfield to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tie-ins, were marketed with the same proximity to screens that she now decries.

A more useful frame may be Cory Doctorow's term "enshittification" — the process by which a user experience degrades sharply as value is extracted from the user. Doctorow coined it for Silicon Valley, where business models pivot from serving individuals to serving corporations, but the term has proven portable across industries. Kyle Chayka, reviewing the concept in The New Yorker, called it satisfying but insufficient. "Perhaps the worst outcome of enshittification is that it drives us to expect things to be bad," Chayka wrote, "and to assume that they will only get worse."

Cyca's critique, in the end, is less about the fair's current offerings or function than its vibe — its entanglement in a broader sense of cultural degradation. Lamenting an earlier, better object can distract from the economic system that produced both the fair and its squishmallows. As for the institution itself, the jury remains out: there is good, there is schlock, there is capitalism, and it may simply be the readers who are finally growing up.