Who invented summer notebooks? | Understand + with history


This Wednesday is the last day of the course for primary school students and classes begin. school holidays. While the children are excited, parents hide panic attack incipient that assails them just thinking that until September they will have to have their offspring entertained. And although mobile phones, tablets, video games and every existing screen emerge as a kind of sirens to tempt little Ulysses, many families try not to spend all the hours in the world abducted on the planet of bits. As staking the creatures on the mast of the ship like the protagonist of Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’ would surely bring legal problems to the parents, they are looking for other methods of entertainment. And that’s when they make an appearance holiday notebooks, although for more than one creature they look more like torture than a hobby.

It is possible that with digital technologies, for the generations of the 21st century, these little colored books do not have the meaning they had for their parents, who perhaps they still carry the trauma of when they were forced to do the notebook. Well, here and now, we will explain to each other who was its inventor at European level. For that you need to move to the France of 1932.

That year, a young stationery representative named Roger Magnard got married with Suzanne Saint-Martin, daughter of a bookseller from Guéret, a town in New Aquitaine, a region in the center of the Hexagon. With the idea of ​​improving family income, he began to think about how he could achieve a peak in sales of school supplies, just as there was already one in the fall with the start of the school year. She found inspiration in a few little books called ‘holiday homework’ who published Raymond Fabry in the collection ‘L’école des bons livres’. It was a compendium of exercises to consolidate the knowledge of the finished course and prepare the next one.

Based on that concept, Magnard wanted to make one that, in addition to being useful, was also visually appealing. He printed out some large, brightly colored notebooks filled with rather playful activities that offered entertainment while helping to revise. They had riddles, spaces to draw, ‘collages’, alphabet soups… He put them up for sale only in the Guéret area and hoped to sell some six or seven thousand at the most, but the success exceeded all expectations and reached 50,000. The children in that part of Aquitaine were crazy to get their parents to buy them a notebook. That encouraged Magnard to expand the supply and circulation and in 1938 it already exceeded 300,000 throughout the country. Not even the Second World War stopped the business: in 1948 it reached a million copies sold and during the fifties all the French students spent the summer accompanied by a Magnard edition notebook. Furthermore, it became a social phenomenon because to stimulate sales every September he organized a contest to reward the best finished notebooks. The prizes were spectacular for the time: bicycles, color televisions and even a car! With this lure, it was ensured that the older ones were the first interested in buying the notebooks for their children and in encouraging them to complete them.

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During the seventies, with the arrival of large commercial surfaces in France, other publishers took the opportunity to launch their own notebooks on the market, which were distributed through supermarkets next to the school supplies. It was just at that time that the first local versions of that French product also began to be sold in Spain. And, without a doubt, the label that managed to become the great reference in this sector was Santillana with the notebooks called ‘Santillana Holidays’, that marked the childhood of the generations born in the late seventies and early eighties. He is sure that more than one of those who then shied away from doing it, now persecutes the children so that they finish theirs.


Nostalgia

Appealing to childhood nostalgia, in recent years many publishers have begun to publish notebooks for adults to entertain themselves during the summer holidays. It is common to see in bookstores and supermarkets pads and notebooks full of activities for those who miss those summer hours when they were little.


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