Dangerous and Daring Burger King

Sunday afternoon, while the dogs barked 'hello' at every person who walked past the van and the Wifey and I stretched our road-weary legs, I stood in the entry of the Burger King just off the Highway 93 exit in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, studying their new Kid's Meal promotions. The current promotion is divided into "girl toys" and "boy toys", but rather than Hot Wheels and Barbie, these two are quite related. The boy toys are based on The Dangerous Book for Boys, and the girl toys are based on The Daring Book for Girls.

Fast food restaurants have often had book-related toys, but usually those are released in conjunction with a film or television show based on the book, one step removed from the original content. The Dangerous and The Daring books aren't being adapted and re-released, as far as I know at the moment, but Burger King says the promotion was chosen because those books are "a perfect example of the brand harnessing the popularity of the books and bringing that sense of adventure into Burger King restaurants." Books and adventure — and fast food! Sure, I play my hipster card and mock any attempt of mainstream culture to spread outside its banks, but I can't help but be pleased with the attempt.

The toys leave a bit to be desired, though. I know, what can I expect from a cheap meal? Well, I can expect more than this: they pretty much just took different toys, put "Dangerous" or "Daring" in the title, and tossed them into the kiddie bags. The Boy toys are "Dangerous Fossils", "Dangerous Space", and Dangerous Snake." The snake is a flashlight, the space 'danger' are space-themed stencils, and the dangerous fossils (?!) are a Play-Dough style mold. The girls toys are similarly un-Daring: "Daring Animals," "Daring Watercolor", and "Daring Creatures". The creatures are a dough-mold toy like the fossils; the animals are a stencil set like the space boy toy. The saddest toy is the Daring Watercolor: it contains neither a real brush, nor real watercolors. It has a fake brush which, when it absorbs water and transfers it to the "paper", a picture appears. What could be sadder than a painting whose content, color, and style has already been decided for you, masquerading as Daring Toy for Girls?

From a kid's standpoint, compared to a Devo toy, an educational toy might seem to suck, but other restaurants have done a better job of it in the past. Come on: last fall Arby's had a "metal detector" as a kid's toy reward. Sure, you can't expect to find lost gold with it, but even if it remotely detects the difference between a nickel and a finger, you've got something there. My daughter got a Spy Kids themed camera in a McDonald's Happy Meal a few years ago, and it actually took pretty good pictures for an all-plastic 110 (Lomo enthusiasts probably would pay $50 for one now). One big feature of the Dangerous and Daring books are how they encourage kids to interact with the outside world around them — a snake-shaped penlight is hardly doing the job. D also remarked that the timing was rather odd: a book of activities, fun, and games might have been better timed for the spring, before school was out. The toys may not spread the safe subterfuge of the two books, but the wall-sized posters and banners hung in fast food restaurants around the U.S. will hopefully make a difference. The toy might be discarded before the kid gets back to her carseat, but we can hope that the seed was planted, and a Daring Book for Girls will appear under her Christmas tree in a couple months.

Bookaholics Anonymous

As a cute pejorative, calling a book lover a "bookaholic" is somewhat apt. Anyone looking at our house would certainly call us one, with the stacks on the diningroom table waiting to be shelved, provided we have some shelvespace. There is certainly something compulsive about our book acquiring, so much so that we recently grabbed them out of the trash during Cleanup Week. We might be obsessive, but that's just part of our charm, you know.

At the Book Industry Conference recently, Simon Juden of the Publishers Association in the UK announced their new marketing plan, admitting it was edgy, and that was a selling point over duller and less fun plans that came out of the brainstorming. The idea was to promote books under the umbrella of bookaholism. "Once you've started it's hard to stop," as a nod to their addictiveness; "Books are mind expanding," stretching the -aholism suffix to cover drug addiction references; "Consume no less than one a month," to hint that one's consumption must be monitored. There is still that cute pejorative underneath, but, wow, the UK must have a view alcoholism more in a Foster-Brooksian way than a MADD way.

At least here in the U.S., alcoholism is deeply attached to great harm to onesself and loved ones. We to glorify excess drinking more than other countries (the ubiquitousness of beer pong & beer bongs are both big recognizeable icons of that), but there's a distinct gravity to the accusation of being an alcoholic. Once you've moved into alcoholism, you've been branded as destructive to yourself and others, and you've got a disease that you'll need to manage for the rest of your life. Books are already teetering against the accusation of being harmful and dangerous: it's not the best thing to associate books with. Start labelling WeightWatcher's dinners with the tagline "You've Come A Long Way, Baby," and you might see a negative reaction to the product. The music industry could have gone with "CDs are for everybody" in the early eighties. Engendering an underlying uneasiness of a product's safety with a tagline that associates it with disease isn't helpful.

Despite the negative association with alcoholism in the U.S., chocaholics, workaholics, and shopaholics still roam our streets, without people immediately associating them with liver disease and tragic car wrecks. However, I'd say they get passes because chocolate, work, and shopping are all virtues of the American culture; imbuing those virtues with an underlying negative reminds that too much of a virtue could be bad. Lumping books into the 'virtuous' column is an excellent idea, but the publishing industry intends to use it as a way to attract customers, due to an existing negative. Chocolatiers refering to customers as chocaholics is a witty self-deprecating response because, well, most people already like chocolate. They are not going to convert somebody who doesn't like chocolate by associating its addictiveness with alcohol or illicit drugs. Workaholism and shopaholism are even being treated as pop-culture diseases; again, not a way to bolster the economy by declaring all Americans become workaholics and shopaholics (although that's another discussion). With books already tagged with a stigma of not being as fun as other pasttimes, and possibly having dangerous ideas inside, the attempt to make it a cute cultural disease is a nice attempt, but woefully weak when it comes to attracting bookbuyers. Book lovers like myself may understand and appreciate being called a bookaholic, but the rare reader who sees an ad suggesting they become a bookaholic may not be as turned on as the publishing industry hopes.

(cartoon adapted from here)

Old Books Wanted: 1939

This ad was from the 10 November 1939 issue of Radio Guide, although American Book Mart was a regular advertiser and this particular ad ran quite a bit. Big money was promised for relatively common books; the prices, no doubt, were for pristine first editions, but the promise of selling your books to a dealer for real money during that tenuous Post-Depression-Pre-WWII time period was probably an intriguing offer. Since there's no good indicator of what the price is for, there's one point I find very interesting: "Tamerlane & Other Poems" from Edgar Allen Poe was first printed in 1827, and would fetch $5,000 (an enormous amount of money for the time), about the same "Pilgrim's Progress" and "Venus & Adonis" -- both of which were first printed hundreds of years before Poe. "Tamerlane" was originally published in a very small run, and few people believed it existed when Poe printed his second edition; first verified copies of the small book were not discovered until fifty years later. For all Poe's popularity and such rarity, $5,000 was a bargain for American Book Mart -- there are only 12 copies in the world today.

While the list is almost identical to any English professor's "greatest hits" list, the McGuffey's Primer is an interesting inclusion. It's also a relatively recent book, for the 1930s, and as a schoolbook it was published in enormous numbers, remaining in print (and in educational use) for years. Even today, McGuffey's schoolbooks are considered somewhat-useful in education. American Book Mart is probably looking for a first edition, about a hundred years' old at the time, and were willing to pay top dollar for it. They must know something I don't -- but it's going to make me look closer at primers when I'm out shopping for books.

The ad offers people the opportunity to get a copy of ABM's full catalog, for fifteen cents, before they start shipping off their books and expecting a bale of dollar bills to arrive in the mail. From what I can tell, it was quite a book on its own, hardcover and over a hundred pages -- and, whaddayaknow? Antiquarian booksellers today are offering old American Book Mart catalogs for sale as well.

Babalicious Libraries

The Wyoming State Library, in the interest of bringing attention to the libraries in their state, has produced an award-winning ad campaign. My favorite: The sexy-girl-mudflap image (see ex.), adapted to have the busty lady reading a book. That's my kind of gal! That particular image is designed to advertise the Library's free access to the online Chilton library -- an excellent bonus, compared to a lot of other areas. Car repair and chromed babes go hand-in-hand, and books are sexy, you've got to admit it. For the state with the smallest population and a reputation for a cowboy lifestyle, Wyoming's library system does a good job of making themselves useful, resulting in over 8 items checked out per year per capita (ref). I'm sure this is due to the statewide library-card, allowing cardholders to check out books, anywhere -- including colleges -- with their one card. When a state makes their libraries both sexy and accessible, it's no wonder people use them.