Linda Falkenstein
When Molly Fields can’t find the books she wants, she’ll write them herself.
Books4School leads a kind of double life. Like your average superhero. On the surface, it’s a mild-mannered warehouse on an obscure side street just off the Beltline, filled with paperback and hardcover books geared toward kids from preschool to 12th grade. The public is welcome to shop, Monday through Friday, although Books4School also does a lot of business through groups like Reading is Fundamental and Reach Out and Read, as well as other reading organizations.
But beyond its identity as a resource for schools, homeschoolers and young bookworms, Books4School has some publishing industry clout. Molly Fields, director of business development and guiding light for the business, is a bubbly evangelist for getting books into the hands of kids.
Her motto? “Getting the most number of books into kids’ hands for the least amount of money.”
The average price of a book at Books4School is $1.85. Bin after bin on shelf after shelf throughout the building bear labels mostly ranging from $1.65 to $2.50. Fields is able to do this by looking for deals throughout the industry but also by “adding to the backs of the print runs,” Fields explains. When Fields agrees to take an additional 3,000-some books for Books4School, the cost of the entire print run goes down for the publisher, and costs go down for all.
Linda Falkenstein
Most books are priced between &1.65 and $2.50.
Fifteen employees (including part-timers) sort and stock the inventory. Fields draws on their various real-world experiences in choosing books, including one’s work experience with at-risk youth.
The family-owned business (Fields herself is the fifth generation working there) began selling newspapers, periodicals and books in the 1920s. Fifty years ago, Fields’ grandfather built the warehouse still in use today to house the business, known at the time as Interstate Periodicals.
Fields is concerned with the lack of available multicultural titles for kids — those featuring characters of different backgrounds and races, and also those written in languages other than English. To that end, she has worked not only to find more books like these to sell, but also to create them.
Medical and dental clinics have contacted Fields to create custom-content books for their patients — a title, for instance, that calms fears about going to the dentist and reinforces the importance of tooth brushing, at the same time featuring a diverse cast of kids. Fields’ book, Madison Goes to the Dentist, is also available in Spanish: Madison va al dentista. The same is true for another of Fields’ creations, At the Doctor/Visita Al Doctor. Both books feature appealing kid-centric illustrations by Anita DuFalla of Pittsburgh.
Fields is working with publishers to create more children’s books written in Hmong, Somali and Arabic. Another project was generated by Fields’ father — a retelling of Humpty Dumpty that features a child who uses a wheelchair. “It opens the minds of kids, as well as parents,” says Fields.
The warehouse on East Badger Road stocks about 2,000,000 books on the average day, from those print overruns to remainders, says Fields. The vintage of some of these buys can be seen in a box full of Virginia Lee Burton’s classic picture book The Little House — shrink-wrapped with a reading of the text on cassette. The fact that cassettes are cool again doesn’t stop this one from being priced at that irresistible $1.85. More recent hardcover books are sold at 35 percent off the cover price.
And it is an unexpected pleasure to hear a small voice walking down a row of books piping, “Mom, can I have it? It’s only a dollar. Mom?”
Books4School
201 E. Badger Road; 608-277-2407; books4school.com, 7 am-4:30 pm Mon.-Fri.
