Getting Johnny to Read

During his 36 years as a book manufacturer, President Sidney Satenstein of the American Book-Stratford Press, Inc. has been doing his best to persuade more Americans to read. In 1930 he put Alexander Woollcott on the radio as "The Early Bookworm." The program flopped ("Didn't sell a book"), and so did Satenstein's radio efforts with Reviewers Harry Hansen and Clifton Fadiman. Gradually, Satenstein decided that chasing after adults was largely a waste of time. "You've got to get to the children," says he. "The thing to sell is the reading habit early."

Last year, with funds from the book industry, Satenstein and a small group of colleagues started a national crusade to sell the reading habit. He organized the nonprofit Library Club of America, Inc. in Manhattan, hired Reading Specialist Frank Jennings of New Jersey's Bloomfield Junior High School to run it. Last fall the club began with experimental chapters in three of Manhattan's Lower East Side public schools. As the months passed, the movement spread to New Jersey, then started west. This week, after only a year of operation, the club has thousands of boys and girls enrolled in chapters across the U.S.

In setting up L.C.A., Satenstein took his cue from the Boy Scouts. If youngsters will work and hike and study to earn Scout merit badges, why can't they be induced to read for similar rewards? To each of its chapters, L.C.A. sends free buttons, pins, banners and certificates. After reading four books, a pupil gets a plastic membership button. Six more books bring a bronze-coated honor pin, and eight more bring the gold-plated life membership button. L.C.A. makes no attempt to dictate what books are to be read, lets local teachers and librarians improvise on the basic program as they wish. Examples of how local chapters work

P: In the first three Manhattan schools that started chapters, 400 pupils joined up. They used small bookmobiles to take books from class to class, wrote and delivered special book reports, concocted their own book blurbs to get other children interested. The contagion spread even to the parents. Puerto Rican children brought home Spanish books for their mothers and fathers; some began teaching their parents English. Other pupils reported other results. Said one: "My mother never belonged to the public library. Now that I go so much, she has joined too."

P: Of the 380 fourth-through-eighth-graders in New Jersey's Caldwell Township school, half are now working for various L.C.A. merit buttons. Some members have become such avid readers that one mother complained: "I can't get my children to bed any more. They want to sit up and read."

P: In Hayward, Calif. 650 children joined a summer program run by the local club, plowed through so many of the 6,000 volumes set aside for them in the public library that Librarian Gladys Conklin declared : "The only thing wrong with this whole program is that we may run out of books."

P: In Santa Cruz, Calif, the library has given out 1,000 L.C.A. membership pins, estimates that the club has boosted the town's reading by one-third.

If the movement continues to grow at its present rate. Founder Satenstein hopes that it will become as much a fixture in the life of young America as the Scouts. In that case, it will no longer be the ward of the book industry, but a recognized national organization supported by tax-deductible gifts. Meanwhile, teachers and librarians have been writing the L.C.A. Manhattan headquarters at the rate of 200 letters a month, asking how they can start chapters of their own.

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