November 11, 2020

100 Years of Reading: Celebrating Scholastic’s Legacy

34 minutes

Today, we're celebrating Scholastic's 100th anniversary with President, Chairman, and CEO Dick Robinson. Dick's father, Maurice R. Robinson, known affectionately to generations of staffers as Robbie, founded the company in 1920, a venture that started with a small weekly newspaper has since grown into the world's largest publisher and distributor of children's books. Generations of readers have fond memories of attending a Scholastic Book Fair on an autumn afternoon, or checking off a list of books to purchase on one of the many Scholastic Book Club order forms that arrived in classrooms.

Kids have grown-up with, and obsessed over Clifford the Big Red Dog, Goosebumps, The Baby-Sitters Club, Harry Potter, and Captain Underpants. Stories by Suzanne Collins, the late Walter Dean Myers, Raina Telgemeier, Pam Muñoz Ryan, and Kelly Yang, to name a few, still captivate young readers. Scholastic News and Junior Scholastic are still staples in classrooms across the country, and Scholastic Kid Reporters are still out there getting stories that matter to them and their young readers.

Last, but not least, young people still receive coveted Scholastic Art & Writing Awards each year, as they have done for nearly a century. Past recipients include Andy Warhol, Bernard Malamud, Kay WalkingStick and Mozelle Thompson. The list goes on, but we wanted to hear from Dick about his memories of his father, the early years at the company, and how he has remained true to his father's vision, that few things are more magical than children discovering themselves in the pages of a book.

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