In the fall of 1920, Maurice Robinson sat down in his mother’s sewing room in Pittsburgh and assembled a four-page newsletter. He called it Western Pennsylvania Scholastic, priced it at five cents, and sold it to high school students around the area. It was a modest beginning for what would become one of the most influential children’s publishing companies in the world. Robinson had no way of knowing that this small classroom magazine would grow into a global business reaching more than a hundred countries, or that it would one day publish some of the most beloved book series of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The early years were slow. Within five years, circulation reached about 33,000 copies, and by the mid-1930s the company was turning a profit. Robinson expanded the lineup with Junior Scholastic, a publication aimed at younger readers, and over the decades the company added more magazines with different focuses until it became the leading provider of classroom periodicals in the United States. Today, Scholastic puts out more than thirty separate classroom magazines each month, reaching over eleven million readers, mostly students from pre-kindergarten through sixth grade.

These magazines were not just the company’s founding product; they were the foundation for everything that followed. The relationship that Scholastic built with teachers across the country opened the door to a second major line of business. In the years after World War II, paperbacks were becoming popular in the United States, thanks in large part to a company called Pocket Books. Robinson saw an opportunity.

By teaming up with Pocket Books, Scholastic launched its Teen Age Book Club, a system that allowed students to order affordable books through their classrooms. Teachers handed out catalogs, students took them home to choose titles with their parents, and then returned their orders to the teacher, who placed the order and distributed the books when they arrived. Initially, orders were placed by tearing out a physical form from the classroom magazines. In 2001, Scholastic invested $22 million in its website, finally moving the book club ordering process online.

Around the same time, the company spent $400 million to acquire a competing book club provider, solidifying its dominance in this unusual distribution channel. In 1981, Scholastic logically extended the same idea to book fairs. The company began by acquiring California School Book Fairs, and then expanded nationally two years later with a larger acquisition. For more than four decades since, Scholastic has worked with school librarians and parent volunteers to set up temporary mobile bookstores in gymnasiums and libraries, letting children browse and select books for themselves.

The appeal of that personal choice was backed by surveys: 93 percent of students between six and seventeen said they were more likely to finish books they had selected on their own. Schools benefited too, receiving rewards from book club purchases and a share of book fair sales. The system proved mutually beneficial and became a staple of American childhood, with roughly one hundred thousand book fairs still held every year in every state, selling books to millions of children. Publishing was the company’s third great pillar, and the one that would ultimately define its legacy.

Scholastic had been publishing books since 1926, but it was under the leadership of Maurice Robinson’s son, Richard, that the catalog truly exploded. The company’s first century saw remarkably consistent leadership: Maurice Robinson served as CEO for fifty-five years, from the founding until 1975, when his son took over. Richard Robinson, a Harvard graduate and former high school teacher, held the position until his death forty-six years later in 2021. Across the company’s entire first hundred years, it had only those two leaders.

Richard Robinson’s tenure marked the beginning of Scholastic’s most famous franchises. In 1963, Scholastic had published Clifford the Big Red Dog, created by Norman Bridwell. The big red dog became the company’s mascot, sharing the exact shade of red used in the Scholastic logo, with more than 130 million copies in print and two television series to its name. But the defining decade for the company’s publishing business was the late 1980s and 1990s.

In 1986, Scholastic published the first books in two series that would become children’s classics: The Baby-Sitters Club by Ann M. Martin and The Magic School Bus by Joanna Cole. Both went on to sell millions of copies and generate popular television shows and movies. Then came 1992, a year that reshaped the company’s fortunes.

Scholastic published the first installments of the I Spy series, where readers solve riddles to find hidden objects, and more notably, Goosebumps by R. L. Stine. The horror series aimed at younger readers became a phenomenon, selling four million copies per month in the mid-1990s and reaching over 400 million English-language books in print.

Legal disputes over the rights followed, but in 2003 Scholastic purchased the full rights to the series outright. In 1996, Scholastic published the first of the Animorphs books, a science fiction series about children who can transform into animals. The following year brought Captain Underpants by Dav Pilkey, who later created the Dogman series, also published by Scholastic. But the franchise that would transform the company entirely came in 1998, when Scholastic acquired the United States publishing rights to a British novel about a young wizard.

The company won the rights to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for $15,000, and went on to publish the entire series, breaking records with each new release. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold 8. 3 million copies in the United States within its first twenty-four hours. The profits from the series funded aggressive expansion, including that $400 million acquisition of the competing book club provider.

The hits kept coming. In 2008, Scholastic began publishing The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, which went on to sell over one hundred million copies. In 2016, the company added The Bad Guys series by Aaron Blabey. Nearly every major series Scholastic published after I Spy was adapted into multiple films or television shows, most of them extremely successful.

The company’s reach extended beyond books in 2024, when Scholastic paid over $180 million to acquire Nine Story Media Group, including the animation studio Brown Bag Films, the production company behind popular children’s shows like Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and Doc McStuffins. Education, distribution, and publishing were never fully separate lines of business. The classroom magazines built relationships with teachers; the book clubs and book fairs gave those teachers and their students a convenient way to buy books; and the publishing arm supplied the titles in the first place. Today, Scholastic works with over 90 percent of schools in the United States, publishes more than six hundred titles each year, and generates well over a billion dollars in annual sales.

Its Art and Writing Awards, begun in 1923, have recognized creative teenagers for a century, with past winners including Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, Stephen King, Ken Burns, and Lena Dunham. The company that began as a four-page newsletter in a sewing room in Pittsburgh now operates in over a dozen countries and sells its products in nearly every country on earth. What started as a fifty-cent-a-copy classroom magazine became the largest distributor of children’s books in the world, and the publisher behind some of the most widely read children’s stories of all time.

For millions of former students, the memory of walking into a Scholastic Book Fair remains one of the defining experiences of elementary school.