"Who Ordered 'Johnny Got His Gun'?"

Way back in the dinosaur age, when I was in grade school, we used to order books in our classes from Scholastic Books (yes, the same company who's made a mint publishing "Harry Potter"). We'd get a four- or six-page newsprint "catalog", check off the books we wanted, bring in our money, and a few weeks later, a big box would arrive and the teacher would hand them out.

In grade school, the books were pretty much what you'd expect for the age group - thin picture books about pets, "girls" stories about horsies and that sort of things, "boys" books about cowboys and space flight. The book I remember most fondly from that period was "The Mad Scientists' Club," about a group of Boy Scouts with just enough scientific knowledge to cause some light-hearted trouble around their small town. I still have no idea why this has never been made into a movie.

Things got a little more interesting, however, in junior high (7th and 8th grade, where I grew up). I ordered "Johnny Got His Gun", for example. Talk about a 7th-grade mind-blower! I also got "Dune" and "Future Shock" through them, and I recall they had a fairly good selection of "popular" titles intended for a more general audience.

When I look back on it, it's really surprising to me that Scholastic didn't get complaints about carrying those books. Even then, "Johnny Got His Gun" was considered a touchstone of anti-war literature (and Trumbo was well-known, of course, as a blacklisted writer in Hollywood). And I recall "Dune" being touted as part of the "ecology" movement at the time (don't remember why, exactly - just that it was).

Maybe they did get complaints, but they just didn't care. The sort of people bitching about that sort of thing back then were pretty much considered to be "cranks" and were generally ignored. However, in the town I was living, they had several big dust-ups about that time involving the presence of "Catcher in the Rye" and "Manchild in the Promised Land" in the high school library. There was also a big controversy because a teacher had let a student play Jethro Tull's "Aqualung" in class, "Aqualung" being a big anti-God screed. Amazingly, in both cases, the very conservative school board, after holding a few meetings, did nothing about the complaints. Something about "free speech" and "learning," apparently.

Apparently, Scholastic still sells books to school students, though now you do the ordering online. Unfortunately, their online site is down for the summer - I'd be interested to see what sort of titles they carry for the "young adult" crowd these days...