Sitting at work protecting the glass double doors from unknown terrors, I watch the pumpkin colored leaves catting after one another along the sidewalk, and I know, I say, This is autumn. And this makes me think, quite naturally of…well, Scholastic Book Services, specifically the Arrow Book Club.

I am atremble with nostalgia. Books bring me home. And Arrow, tailor-made and kid-tested (presumably) for grades 4-5-6, was once the gate of exquisite delight.

Remember the monthly slender cheap-paper catalogs with all those varieties of experience stacked inside? Inexpensive books, some as little as sixty-five cents, perfectly written, perfectly created.

All right, some were awful. The Shark in Charlie’s Window comes to mind, a hybrid of children’s exotic pet fantasy and Jaws—a little too cheesy. But for the most part, I was not disappointed with these worlds that SBS offered.

I know I read enough of them (and bought enough) to build myself a tomb, but only a few titles are yet clear in memory. The SBS dealt in three genres principally: kid detective thrillers, historical fiction, and the so-called Problem Novels.

Detective thrillers were represented by The Three Investigators series, in my mind far superior to the rather tepid shenanigans of the Hardy Boys. Even at nine I could recognize the added senses of humor and irony, and The Mysterious Three were each offbeat enough to add a dimension of empathy (the Hardys always struck me as mannequins, and not, frankly, very good detectives). The cases were formulaic (as is Agatha Christie), but there was a keep-rolling panache to the doings that primed us all for derring-do Doc Savage reprints. And at the end of each adventure, they reported in to…Alfred Hitchcock.

I betcha we read the same books: Silver for General Washington, My Side of the Mountain, Soup and Me, The Phantom of Walkaway Hill…

One of my all-time faves was Strangely Enough!, a compendium of eighty “hair-raisers” culled from C. B. Colby’s column Adventure Today! in The White Plains Post-Dispatch. Tales of ghosts and flying saucers, buried treasures on land and sea, hairbreadth’s escapes and Fortean mythos! Colby was a marvel of word economy and I often recall him to mind when I grow too loquacious. Strangely was a rare find captured in my mother’s cedar closet (perhaps reserved for when I was older) at age eight. I read it in a single sitting, all day, as the October failing sun lengthened the shadows of the trees along the woods. I have re-read the book almost every October since.

Arrow offered selected reprints of 1950s Mad Magazine material, such as The Greasy Mad and The Mad Frontier, thus allowing me to see the glories of the once independently-owned savagely satirical magazine—from the time when it ridiculed Madison Avenue ad merchants and finky politicians. I remember trying to watch Hollywood or Bust on Flippo’s Early Show and reading Greasy at the same time—and then later a huge-ass storm comes Dorothy Gale-ing out of nowhere and I ended up getting smackerooed in the kisser by a fistful of hailstones…You wouldn’t recognize Mad today (or even Arrow) and Flippo died a couple of years ago—not even the storms are quite the same.

Now I’m flashing back to those Scholastic Press hardbacks—the anthologies of ghost and mystery stories, the young athlete tales of struggling left-hand pitchers and gridiron smallfry dime-backs. And the soap box racers! And all those I bought at the block yard sale, from David Robinson’s stash…and how all his books had library proprietary markings, and I remembered how the school library had been broken into the year before…but if David (Blessed be the womb that bore him!) five-fingered books, he grabbed classics. He had a volume of Poe, goddammit!

The challenged-athlete books grew into the Problem Novel. I loved the Problem Novel, even though the best ones were for TAB, not Arrow members. They always had carnival titles: Then Again Maybe I Won’t, I’ll Get There It Better Be Worth the Trip, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich—as if Maya Angelou was making ends meet by tossing out her unused material. The Problem Novel was supposed to be the turning point of a kid facing an ultimate moral dilemma. I saw a posted modern “concerned parent” reacting to “titles and subjects in Scholastic flyers that curl my toes.” She would have loved I’ll Get There It Better Be Worth the Trip from our long-gone 1970s, in which the thirteen-year-old principles wind up trying to back-burner their homosexual experiences and just try to “be friends.” (To think Gore Vidal had virtually been blacklisted for The City and the Pillar a few decades earlier!)

(Just so you know, I am writing a Problem Novel with a glorious title as séanced through Patty Highsmith. The title shall remain veiled at this point.)

Arrow offered other neat stuff, like posters and especially like Dynamite Magazine. Dynamite was edited by Jeanette Khan, who later went on to run DC Comics into the ground. Dynamite imitated Mad in some aspects (all these years later, Mad Kids imitated Dynamite). It was a skinny-assed wash of color trap-birded between cardboard covers, and we werewolfed down every issue. Dynamite defined fifth-grade cool. Ask me, however misguided Khan’s shipwreck at DC, she created ‘80s Nickelodeon Chic with Dynamite. Every slim page was printed on gold, I think. It was Esquire for brats. Wish I still had all those.

Arrow was on-target always in sniffing out trends and capturing the loose change of the popular kid-minded moment. There was a unity in their line and some sort of quality-assurance program that publishers in general have never mastered (which is very likely a good thing).

A friend with young girls sent me some recent flyers (thanks Teri), or as I prefer to call them, catalogs. *sigh* Yes, the grass is no longer as green as it was under Tom Sawyer’s toes.

Harry Potter is frighteningly ubiquitous. Way too overwhelming, too much of a publiswhorial piñata. I know J. K. Rowling wordfilters as Anne Rice for latter-day gridiron midgets, but Jaysus Rumble, break it up, willya? Reissue some Michael de Larrabeiti fer fook’s sake.

And, of course, every novel seems to have a “strong girl heroine”—not much room for boys to dream. If they do, they’ve been getting series trash like Animorphs for the past twenty years. Remember Scott O’Dell’s The Black Pearl? The Problem Novel boy of today is one whose Gundam Guyver is fresh out of ammo.

We never recovered our Arrow head’s lead. When TAB came around, most kids had decided print was beneath contempt, and the teachers at Kennedy Jr. High did not want to futz with it. We irregularly got TAB catalogs. SBS dropped out of my life, except in memories. And yeah, by eleven I was bleeding from the ears after reading David’s copped Poe, but I could sail through Wells. I was on my way to being an intellect vast cool and unsympathetic—or so I hoped.

Yet I sometimes wish there was an Arrow for the Really Big Kids—you know, us. I crave that careful selection, that unity of thought, that fearful symmetry.

In the interest of these precepts, I offer you a short list of adult tomes that give me that old SBS vibe.

Marvin Kaye’s anthologies for Doubleday, such as Ghosts and Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, have the same tingle as SBS ghostly collections—which is not at all to say they are tame, although Kaye purposely excoriates the exact kind of horror that I write (i.e., “nauseatingly vivid”). His erudition on the weird tale is profound.

Mark A. Stein’s How the States Got Their Shape is the kind of you-never-knew-how-much-you-wanted-to-know-this-stuff trivial history that SBS would spin out as a 65-cent special. Painless page-turning little-knowners about the politics behind those odd juts and jagged lines on the map. Ever wonder why California didn’t include Baja, and yet has that weird angle that scarfs up Sandy Eggo before veering North? Well, it wasn’t a surveyor’s bungle.

Elsewhere mentioned, Earl Thompson’s dynamic duo of A Garden of Sand and Tattoo serve as a complex Problem Novel that will curl Concerned Parent’s toes. Will little Jack Anderson try to resolve his issues of poverty via incest? Will he fuck his way to the top of his lowlife? Then Again, Maybe He Will.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower stuff bristles with SBS fantasy inanities (what, a robot bear with a satellite dish on its head?) and is just as page-turning as any juvenile detective novel. It’s a western, it’s a medieval fantasy, it’s a mystery story—it’s good fun.

I’ve already invoked de Larrabeiti. With The Borribles, you cannot go wrong—imagine if Tolkien had accidentally written The Monkey Wrench Gang.

Remember how those historical fictions took you there? Gary Jennings’ Aztec leaves the same pleasurable boom in your belly. It is also the work of a man who accepted a dare to include every sexual perversion known to man. And I hafta pimp Scott O’Dell, the first pro writer to praise me. His “juveniles” function perfectly as historical adventures. He’s somewhere between Hemingway and Stevenson.

That’s a suggested short list. If you’ve got any of your own, I’d love to hear about them.