The Baby-Sitters Club books are wildly popular again - and adults are loving the nostalgia

Nostalgia for the 1990s is having a moment right now, if wide-legged jeans, Lisa Frank's Crocs collabo‐ ration and the original Gap fragrances selling for hun‐ dreds of dollars on eBay are any indication.

But when the graphic nov‐ el remake of Ann M. Martin's book Claudia and the Bad Joke was the best-selling kids book in Canada earlier this month, it was time for book‐ worm elder millennials and gen-Xers to feel their hearts flutter with nostalgia. The original, part of the wildly popular The Baby-Sitters Club series, was published in 1988.

It's not a one-off. As Scholastic points out, all of the graphic novel adapta‐ tions of the original books have been on best-seller lists.

The novels have taken off with a new generation of readers, which experts have noted steers the popular comic-style genre to a more female audience. Meanwhile, fans of the original series, which first started publishing in 1986 and chronicled the lives of a fictional group of 12-year-old babysitters, get to experience the books all over again.

Superfans like 41-year-old Erika Dole of Ottawa never stopped.

Dole told CBC News she read the books as a kid and then starting collecting them again when she graduated university in 2005.

"I was feeling that kind of nostalgia for being young, and needed something that was comforting. So I thought, 'You know what? I'm going to complete my collection,'" she said.

The books follow the ad‐ ventures of a group of mid‐ dle-school girls living in fic‐ tional Stoneybrook, Conn., who start a baby-sitting club. Each book typically follows one of the characters at a time, who each have their own backstories (and inspire fan favourites - creative Claudia Kishi is often a frontrunner).

Amid baby-sitting adven‐ tures, the characters face typical teen issues ranging from crushes and bullies to divorced parents, but the books also tackle more seri‐ ous topics like eating disor‐ ders, death and racism.

Dole has spent the last few decades collecting 231 of the original books (including the entire original series), scouring second-hand shops, garage sales and used book stores in and around Ottawa to add to the 30 or so titles she'd kept from her child‐ hood. She just added the fi‐ nal missing piece two mon‐ ths ago - from a spin-off called The California Diaries after snagging a copy from Value Village.

Now, Dole says she hopes that someday her four-yearold daughter might be inter‐ ested in reading them. But she's happy to turn to her collection of books herself for a "quick comfort" when needed.

"I'm going to keep them forever," she said with a laugh.

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It's difficult to describe the hold Martin's books had on a generation of young readers in the 1980s and '90s. It's considered one of the most successful children's book se‐ ries in publishing history, ac‐ cording to Scholastic, the publisher, and was the first children's book series to ap‐ pear on the USA Today best‐ seller list.

"Just about every 8- to 13year-old American girl alive are rabid fans," the New York Times wrote in 1989.

At the time, the newspa‐ per noted the books were "the most successful paper‐ back juvenile series in the country." There were more than 11 million copies of the 21 titles published so far in print, the paper noted. In just one week, nine titles were among the top 20 list put out by B. Dalton, a subsidiary of Barnes & Noble.

''I would never tire of them,'' Nicole Zajack, age 13, said in the 1989 article. ''N‐ ever. Never. Never.''

In all, there were about 250 titles published in the en‐ tire series, which also in‐ cluded super-specials, mys‐ teries, super-mysteries and a few other spin-offs. There was also the Baby-Sitters Lit‐ tle Sister companion series for younger readers, which had 122 books.

There was a fan club. There was merch (and you can bid on some of it on eBay, like a $430 original Jessi doll from 1993). There was a 1990 television adaption, a 1995 movie, and later, a 2020 Netflix series. Bookseller In‐ digo sells "retro sets" of the original books, a term *cough* some original read‐ ers might find offensive.

WATCH | The official trailer for The Baby-Sitters Club movie:

Much like the Goose‐ bumps series, The Baby-Sit‐ ters Club was one of the first to target girls aged nine to 12, Julie Rak, a professor in the English and Film Studies department and the Univer‐ sity of Alberta who re‐ searches literature and pub‐ lishing, told CBC News.

Some of its success likely lies in the fact that the hero‐ ines had agency - they

started their own business and relied on each other to solve problems, Rak said. And then there was the for‐ mat of the books themselves, which were plentiful and for‐ mulaic.

"You knew what you were getting, but that has its own comforts," she said.

Graphic novels take off In 2006, a year after Scholastic launched its graphic novel imprint Graphix, founder David Say‐ lor took a gamble and pub‐ lished the first Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel. At the time, there was some push‐ back from teachers and par‐ ents about graphic novels not really being considered books, Saylor told Publishers Weekly in March.

So, he selected a book parents and teachers grew up reading themselves, he said, and the gamble paid off. There are currently 15 of the graphic novels in print and, as Scholastic points out, all of them have been on best-seller lists. There are al‐ so graphic adaptations of seven of the Little Sister books.

The graphic adaptations were a very smart move, Rak said, noting that even though graphic novels are hugely popular, they are more often steered to male readers.

"Graphic novels don't have to do that, and so they can appeal to female read‐ ers, as well as boys who don't want to read about super he‐ roes, of course."

Ellie Berger, the president of Scholastic Trade, told CBC News in an email statement that the books are classics that still resonate with kids and adults around the world thanks to universal themes of friendship, family, empow‐ erment and entrepreneurial‐ ism.

"Today the popularity of the series is as strong as ever, with kids devouring the bestselling Baby-sitters Club graphic novel adaptations," Berger said in the statement, adding that more graphic novels are "coming soon."

A 'built-in echo audi‐ ence'

Ariella Borsuk, 39, of Ot‐ tawa, told CBC News she started reading the books when she was in Grade 3, and probably read them all at least 30 times - sneaking in books at recess, in the bath, and before bed. Now, she reads the graphic novels with her children, who are ages seven and nine.

"It's so fun to share these books with my kids, and hon‐ estly, these books had a huge impact on me," Borsuk said.

"I became fascinated with ASL because of Jessi's Secret Language and studied it in university. Medicine and the human body have been spe‐ cial interests of mine that started with Stacey and learning about diabetes. I took art history classes be‐ cause of Claudia."

There's a "built-in echo audience" with a younger generation of fans now, said Duncan Stewart, a consumerforecasting analyst for De‐ loitte who lives in Toronto and specializes in media and technology, including book publishing.

Assume someone born between 1980 and 1990 had their first kids sometime in between 2010 and 2015 or so, he explained. They proba‐ bly have fond memories of the series.

"Now they're sitting with with their daughters and reading them? Makes sense to me," Stewart said.

As for Dole, the collector in Ottawa, her next goal is to nab one of the sought-after original covers. Artist Hodges Soileau was commissioned to create oil paintings for the covers in the 1980s, and most of them have already been sold to avid fans.

On his Instagram account, Soileau recently posted that he just sold another and only has a few left. The comments are full of fans clamouring for the remaining few.

"I have tried," Dole said with a sigh.