My absolute favorite book from my childhood is Go Dog Go. My mom used to read this and Are you my mother to me before I went to bed. Both of these children’s books were fascinating to me because of their color and silly stories. We often went to Barnes and Noble where I would first go straight to where they had the children’s train set to play with and then to the many rows of books. From fire engines to Captain Underpants, they really had it all. This was pretty exciting, but nothing and I mean nothing-could beat the scholastic book fair. 

If you are unfamiliar, the scholastic book fair is a bunch of mobile book racks, that are taken to schools all around the country. The mobile bookshelves would be delivered to my school and staged in the hallway where every kid would stop and stare at the beauty of their presence. Then, they were moved into our library and the book fair was officially in business. Each class would take turns going into the library to only look and NOT TAKE. This was the absolute worst because they were right there, but you couldn’t do anything about it. Finally after school, after torturing us, they would let us take and buy the books. 

We used to create lists that had every book we were interested in. One year, there was a book about rocks that actually came with rocks and a guild of what the rocks were and everyone wanted it. My mom said she would only pay for three books, so I made sure that the three she bought for me were the best, the rock book being one of them. I then would come back with my own money and go ham. I remember buying five or six books just because I could and still to this day-I have not read them. 

The scholastic book fair was a highlight of my elementary school days and if you were unable to experience this I feel sorry for you. If you have younger siblings in elementary school or know of a scholastic book fair coming to town, I highly recommend you go. It might not be as magical as it might have been if you were younger, but everyone needs to experience a scholastic book fair.