The Baby-Sitters Club
series of novels
The Baby-Sitters Club (also known as the BSC) is a series of novels written by Ann M. Martin and published by Scholastic between 1986 and 2000. Collectively, the series has sold more than 190 million copies. Martin has authored an estimated 60–80 novels in the series, while subsequent titles have been written by ghostwriters such as Peter Lerangis.
The Baby-Sitters Club is about a group of friends living in the fictional, suburban town of Stoneybrook, Connecticut, who run a local babysitting service called the "Baby-Sitters Club". The original four members are Kristy Thomas (founder and president), Mary Anne Spier (secretary), Claudia Kishi (vice-president), and Stacey McGill (treasurer), but the number of members varies throughout the series. The novels are told in first person and deal with issues such as illness, divorce, and moving house.
As the series progresses, Dawn Schafer (Alternate Officer), Mallory Pike and Jessi Ramsey (Junior Officers), Logan Bruno (Associate Member), Shannon Kilbourne (second Associate Member), and Abby Stevenson (Replacement Alternate Officer for Dawn) join the Baby-Sitters Club.
History of the series
The Baby-Sitters Club series originated when Jean Feiwel, an editor at Scholastic, saw the popularity of a novel called Katie's Babysitting Job by Martha Tolles and realized there was a market for novels about babysitting. She contacted Ann M. Martin, who took the general idea of a babysitter's club and created the characters, plots, and settings for the series. It was initially planned as a 10-book series; however, the first 10 novels were only moderately successful.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Baby-Sitters Club” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.