A catalog of cheap (cheapish) reprints of popular children's and young adult books. Sort of like a Book of the Month Club, but for kids. The thing about the Scholastic Books Club is that a) it's all direct to customer sales so it's cheaper than retail and b) the person in charge of the book club (usually the teacher) gets bonus points based on the number of sales which can be redeemed for free stuff (more books for the classroom!)

See
    http://teacher.scholastic.com/bookclubs/index.htm


When I was in grammar school, every couple of weeks, I'd be given a new Scholastic Books Club catalog to take home. I would be so excited because it meant that I would soon be getting new books! Yay! I would take it home and carefully go over the cheap paper catalog with my parents, checking off the books that I wanted (Encyclopedia Brown for me and Beverly Cleary or something for my little sister.) Then I would get my money (mostly nickels and dimes it seemed) and count out the dollar or two per book and put it in a little, yellow envelope which I would guard it with my life. Even then I loved books because, to me, a book was like a time machine and space ship all rolled into one; it could take me anywhere. And a couple of weeks later, when the books would finally come, I would be so happy -- it'd be like Christmas in July. Ahh. Simple pleasures.

These overwhelmingly evil child-soul destroying people were the publishers of a book entitled where do butterflies go when it rains?. That link documents the real-life horrors that I became subjected to following my reading of said book.

I may just have been born under an unlucky goat...but every title that I ever selected from these instillers of fear in the impressionable minds of babes, turned out to be a travesty of everything that kid's books should stand for. The teacher would come around, I'd tick off the seemingly interesting book of my choice, and then come delivery time, I would be payed in full for some hideous crime I'd obviously committed in my previous Karmic cycle (I think it was a Kawasaki).

For the record: It has taken me more than two decades to work up the courage to answer the question that had so piqued my interest as a child:

Butterflies hide when it rains. They usually go to the same places they do for the night. Some butterflies hide under large leaves, some crawl down into dense leaves or under rocks, and some just sit head down on grass stems or bushes with wings held tightly. If the rains are exceptionally hard or of long duration many of the butterflies become tattered or die.

I think that last sentence explains why the book was so reticent in coming forth with anything resembling an actual answer.

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