Like every summer, it's the return of vacation workbooks. But who invented them?

Among Roger Magnard's clients was Raymond Fabry. This director of a major bookstore and stationery store that primarily supplied independent Catholic schools in the Paris region, was also the publisher of the bookstore "l'école des bons livres," now known as "L'école des loisirs." In his catalog, Robert Magnard discovered booklets of "Devoirs de Vacances," small, reduced-format booklets that imposed endless exercises printed in small print for each grade level. These were real chores, austere and off-putting, and didn't really make anyone want to buy anything.

A competition

Roger Magnard took the idea and imagined a more desirable product, in a fairly large format, with an airy layout, large spaces for the answers, numerous illustrations to color, and above all, a fun and optional path allowing both to review the essentials of what one has learned during the year, and to anticipate slightly the next level.

The first notebooks were published in 1934. They were sold only in Creuse, where Roger Magnard lived, as well as in the neighboring departments. The publisher added a personal touch: children's characters, Loulou and Babette, inspired by the first children of his marriage, Louis and Elizabeth, who contributed to the success of his notebooks among schoolchildren. To make these notebooks even more attractive, he worked with teachers and set up a competition. At the end of the summer, the children who returned the most beautiful holiday notebooks won a prize.

Roger Magnard hoped to make a profit from his notebooks with 6,000 or 7,000 copies, but he sold 50,000. From the first year, it was a real success that allowed him to found Éditions Magnard in 1936. During the Second World War, the holiday workbook suffered from the paper shortage that affected all publishers. In addition, the publisher was summoned by the censorship services of the Vichy regime, and Loulou and Babette's notebooks were banned: one exercise suggested coloring the English flag and another had the recitation of Paul Éluard's poem, "Liberty."

The 1950s were the golden age of the Magnard holiday workbook. The publishing house offered big prizes: bicycles, a television set... In 1956, the first prize was none other than a... car, a Renault 4 horsepower! From the 70s and 80s, competition began to emerge. The rise of supermarkets and then hypermarkets allowed major publishing houses to enter the extracurricular market and take over the holiday workbook. Éditions Magnard then abandoned the competition, but it was also during this time that Louis Magnard, the founder's son, raised the company to the level of the largest French school publishers, founded his own distribution company (Dilisco), and then acquired Éditions Vuibert.