Filling the Gaps: The Baby-sitters Club, the Series Book, and the Learning Reader

Anyone involved in encouraging children to read would have found our neighborhood a cheering sight over the past months. Both in school and at home, there has been a ferment over the gradual acquisition of a particular collection of books. Neighboring children have rushed breathless to our door, waving a new purchase under the envious noses of our daughters. There have been excited phone calls: "It's in I saw it at Greenwood's! Are you going to get it? You can borrow mine, but you'll have to wait till I've finished and my sister." Two girls aged eight and ten live in our house. To the cognoscenti, that should be clue enough. All this enthusiasm and book-oriented social activity revolves round one series: the Baby-sitters Club books by Ann M. Martin. At the time of this writing, Book 35 (they come numbered) has just hit the stands. The excitement is not confined to our neighborhood. The journal Emergency Librarian regularly runs a survey of children's bestsellers in the United States and Canada. In the May-June 1989 issue (Kulleseid, 1989), the ten titles listed under American mass market paperbacks were all titles from the Baby-sitters Club series. (Is this a record?) Although this 100% tally has not been maintained, all the lists in the nine months following showed between five and seven out of ten from this series. The Canadian lists do not contain any of the titles (and indeed seem to be collected on a somewhat different basis), but there is no question that Ann M. Martin is a winner north of the border as well. The Baby-sitters Club arrived later in the United Kingdom, and it remains to be seen if it will take off there in the same way.