Prize Books

This summer, our library gave away paperback books as summer reading club prizes, rather than the usual cheap, lead-containing and/or choking hazardous toys. Over all, the response has been very positive, and it’s been interesting to see which books of those we selected have disappeared fastest.

For our independent readers club for up through fourth grade, we offered the following choices (plus a few extra titles we had hanging around due to Baker & Taylor errors—forty copies of The Secrets of Droon #32 was a tad excessive). Bold indicates that we’ve run out since the prize-giving began last night.

• Camp Babymouse (Holm & Holm)
• Case of the Missing Monkey (Rylant)
• Diary of a Fairy Godmother (Codell)
• The Dog That Pitched a No-Hitter (Christopher)
• It’s Disgusting and We Ate It! (Solheim)
• Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher (Coville)
• Laugh-eteria (Florian)
• Marley: A Dog Like No Other (Grogan)
• Millicent Min, Girl Genius (Yee)
• Minnie and Moo Save the Earth (Cazet)
• Mr. Chickee’s Funny Money (Curtis)
• Rotten Ralph Helps Out (Gantos)
• The Secret of Platform 13 (Ibbotson)
• Stink: The Incredible Shrinking Kid (McDonald)
• The Water Horse (King-Smith)

For our read-to-me club, we offered the following choices until our selection got so limited we had to run to the bookstore for more! (We issue these prizes all summer. Instant gratification for the preschoolers, baby!) The most popular choices are bolded.

• Best Friends for Frances (Hoban)
• Biggest, Strongest, Fastest (Jenkins)
• Buzz (Wong)
• Dinosaur’s Day (Thompson)
• The Gingerbread Boy (Egielski)
• Hi, Fly Guy! (Arnold)
• Little Red Riding Hood (Marshall)
• Make Way for Ducklings (McCloskey)
• Mama Cat Has Three Kittens (Fleming)
• Margaret and Margarita (Reiser)
• The Mightiest (Kasza)
• Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (Steig)
• The Three Billy Goats Gruff (Galdone)
• Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears (Aardema)

Okay, so nearly all of them were very popular. Gingerbread Boy was the runaway winner (ha ha), but the rest were all depleted at a pretty even rate.

The middle school/junior high club, which is funded by our Friends of the Library, had $8 Borders gift cards as the prizes—about the list price of a paperback book. A pretty sweet deal, I dare say.

I don’t expect every library to have prizes these nice. It isn’t cheap, even taking wholesale prices into consideration. But since we do have the money in our budget, I think it’s a nice route to take.