The beginnings of a book buying obsession

Draft Readiness Rating -not so happy but I must sleep now and it's about time I posted something.

It's been brought to my attention by Steph that author R. L. Stine is reviving his 'Goosebumps' series. Right on. I think it's great and it got me thinking about my Goosebumps days. Inspired by JIM's new bloggings on his decade-old Firenze trip I decided to drop the pretense that this blog would focus mainly on my present cross-cultural reactions and dive into the past. Or else this will never get updated.
It was so long ago that I read him I cannot say why I liked his stories so much.. which is just as well because they must have come to me before I was sucked into asking the whys of literary pleasures. A dozen of his books are still on a shelf back home. Perhaps only half a dozen but they seem like more when I think back on how I ached to steal every available moment to finish reading them. They got me hooked. I remember reading 'Hit and Run', 'The Hitchhiker', 'The Boyfriend', 'The Girlfriend', 'The Dead Girlfriend', and all 'The Babysitter' ones. Perhaps if I could choose again which of the series' books to read I would go for a more diverse collection of titles but I had little to go by besides the title and the creepy pictures on the shiny paperback covers.
It struck me that babysitters were widely fetishized -although surely it occurred to me without the adjective. I wanted to understand why and so I was sucked into that fetish when I bought my first R. L. Stine book. Don't remember much though, something about dead people phoning where she babysat maybe... anyway, I loved it.

When I was in elementary school our teachers reminded us every few months that the new mail-order book catalogues were in the front office. Come time to go home I would stop by the office and essentially tiptoe into that civilized grown-up place where the deadly serious administrative staff humored no loitering students.
On an otherwise empty counter rested a stack of glossy triptychs. Their existence was mind-blowing. This was a small stack, like these there must have been hundreds, or maybe even thousands of stacks in schools all over the world and hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of kids like me getting their fix of the likes of R. L. Stine, The Boxcar Children and Roald Dahl. Could they also be Mickey Mouse Club fans? I had no way of connecting with them so this would remain a mystery until clues like today's surfaced.
Surely kids nowadays go online for their peer to peer raving and ranting but at the time the internet was, on the one hand, a cyberpunk fantasy I was only vaguely aware of through the antics of Max Headroom, and on the other, and tapestries of grainy ads for electronic bulletin board systems in the regional, computer enthusiast, pulp magazines. Back in the early nineties, the colorful grids in the catalogues were my Amazon.com.
I was hooked to the brands. 'Scholastic'. Wow, what a great word I thought... and the strange way they print it, such weird letters, so fat, so exact, so architectural.. and 'Penguin', oh, their picture! an elegantly subdued orange oval with a cute, but dignified, black and white penguin on top. Woah, what class! These vast menus whet my appetite for more not-really-niche-at-all fictions.

Anyway, to R. L. Stine: good luck with the Goosebumps revival and thank you.