The Nostalgic History Of Pizza Hut's Book It! Program

Now that Pizza Hut is apparently something that's we're nostalgic for, what's the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the pizza chain? Is it the pizzas whose cheese and crusts are pockmarked with appetizing browned spots like craters on some distant, delicious moon? Is it the decadence of the Stuffed Crust Pizza, one of those ideas that marks the high water mark of fast food restaurants throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks? Is it the now-defunct Pizza Hut/Taco Bell hybrid restaurants? If you're of a certain age, perhaps what comes to mind is the enticing promise of Pizza Hut's Book It! program — that if you read a certain amount each month, you would be given a coupon for a free personal pizza.

I would have been an avid reader even without the incentive of Pizza Hut, but it certainly didn't hurt. It didn't matter that I lived in New York and, as such, had access to tasty non-chain pizza on a regular basis. I diligently logged my minutes reading "Encyclopedia Brown" and the "Baseball Card Adventures" (the book series where the kid could travel back in time through baseball cards — one of them had his dad try to stop the Holocaust), eager for that tiny pizza waiting beneath those wonderfully gaudy table lamps. I'm glad I had it, and equally glad that, at a time when reliable institutions of our past seem to be disappearing, the program is still going strong after forty years.

The Book It! Program was the brainchild of Arthur Gunther, the president of Pizza Hut at the time, and Bud Gates, a marketing executive at the company. Prompted by a 1984 initiative from then-President Ronald Reagan which called for businesses to advocate for education, Gunther was inspired to create a reading program by the way his son struggled with literacy as a young child. Soon enough, Pizza Hut would offer pizza coupons, stickers, and buttons to precocious young students who read a certain amount each month. (Alas, they no longer give out those neat little buttons.)

The program is not without its critics. Some argue that it "gamifies" reading rather than encouraging it for its own sake, while others resent the fact that an international fast food giant is involved in their child's education at all. (In hindsight, it makes perfect sense that this was a Reagan-era initiative.) But if just one child developed a lifelong love of literature thanks to the promise of a six-inch pizza, then it can't be entirely worthless — and today, the program reaches millions of kids with celebrity shout-outs from Justin Bieber, Charlamagne Tha God, and every child's favorite, John Lithgow. It's enough to make us forgive how Pizza Hut tested the limits of snack food fusion with the Stuffed Cheez-It Pizza.