The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. And this is the brief overview of Cliff Notes. We're not going to do the exhaustive encyclopedic documentary length Cliff's Notes episode? Nope. We are doing the brief overview of Cliff's Notes. I said it wrong the first time. It's never been Cliff Notes.

It's Cliff's Notes. Yeah, I mean, the first thing we should probably say, because Jerry in the pre-show banter even got it wrong, even though I said, Jerry, we're doing an episode on Cliff's Notes.

she said i used to get cliff notes it's not cliff notes i used to say cliff notes too in high school but uh it is cliff's notes uh as in the person's name was cliff as we'll soon found out find out it used to have an apostrophe then it just became cliff's two words notes without an apostrophe sure then it became cliff's notes all one word but with that n capitalized so stylish

But it has never been Cliff Notes. No, but everyone basically in the world calls it Cliff Notes. Right. And we should tell everyone what this is. If you don't know, I do know that they went around the world a little bit, but it feels like a very American thing.

It is a study aid. It's basically sort of, I was about to say a Cliff Notes version of the book because it's so in the lexicon now. But it's like if you went to read a book in high school in the 80s, like The Scarlet Letter, and you're like, oh, God, do I really have to read The Scarlet Letter? You would go to a store and you would buy this yellow and black, very thin pamphlet. I don't remember how much they were then. They're only about $8.99 now. Yeah.

And it would contextualize the work. It would summarize the work, give you character descriptions, basically everything you needed to know the night before to pass the test or write the paper. Yeah. And like you said, it's entered the lexicon. Most people can recognize it just that from that yellow and black cover. It looks like a Men at Work album cover. Yeah. Or Striper. Striper. Yes. Very nice. Maybe that's where Striper got it. Maybe. Yeah.

And then, yeah, most people in America know what we're talking about. I do wonder how well known it is around the world, though. I mean, I think it's ended up going to 39 countries, but it just feels like a very lazy American thing, especially for Gen Xers to be like, I'll just get that and that's fine. Yeah, because it's been long, basically from the outset, criticized for being this thing

that students read and use instead of actually reading the material, the book that they're supposed to read. That actually ran...

foul, I guess, of what the guy who invented these things intent was. He always said, no, this is not what that's for. You're supposed to read the regular book. You're supposed to read the Scarlet Letter Chuck. And whether you like it or not doesn't matter. And then you get the CliffsNotes and you understand it that much more fully. That was the point. That's right. And of course, we're talking about Keith Hilligas. Oh, I'm kidding.

Clifton Heath Killagas. His name was Cliff. Gentleman was a true corn husker, as we'll see. He was born in 1918 out in the rural sticks of Nebraska. His father was a mail carrier, and he was a very smart kid, and I would assume a smart adult, because he studied physics and math at Midland Lutheran College.

And then was going to grad school for physics and geology at the University of Nebraska. Go Cornhuskers. OK. But dropped out in 1939 to marry a classmate named Catherine Galbraith, at which time he got a job at Long's College Books as a clerk. And that company would later become the Nebraska Book Company. Yeah. So long story short.

Cliff Hilligass was a very smart guy. I saw that he was said to read five books a week basically his whole life. Or did he just read five quick summaries? I don't know. I just don't know. Because he's dead now and we can't ask him.

That's right. But he worked at the NBC, Nebraska Book Company, up until World War II when he went to the Army. He was a meteorologist for the Army Air Corps. So, again, pretty smart dude. Ended up a captain. And his wife, Catherine, worked as a clerk for the Manhattan Project. So she was sharp as a tack as well. Yeah. Also, I want to give big ups. Are we still saying big ups?

Heck yeah, man. We're old people. We can say whatever we want. I want to give big ups to Livia who helped us out with this because there is not a lot of information on Cliff's Notes out there. Yeah. It's just not out there. You can get, appropriately enough, the brief overview of Cliff Notes and its history, but to really dig in and get the details, you've got to get out there. So thanks to her for that. Cheers.

She did it. I think she broke into the estate of the Hillegas estate and stole a diary. She did. I think so. Yeah. And then also I want to give big ups to Mental Floss, too, because they did some really good reporting on it, too. Some good digging. Yeah, for sure. All right. So back to Cliff Hillegas. He was in the Army. Then after the war, he went back to his old job at the Nebraska Book Company. They said, we knew you'd be crawling back. Yeah. Yeah.

And he helped transform them into a wholesale textbook distributor. And he ended up sort of traveling all over the country, buying and selling used textbooks when a little trip to Toronto, Canada, ended up being quite a good thing for the course of his life, right? Yeah, depending on who you're talking about.

It wasn't that good of a thing for a guy named Jack Cole, the guy who we had dinner with in Toronto, who was a bookstore owner. And Jack Cole was like, hey, man, I'm going to let you in on this business opportunity. I have these condensed pamphlets that basically are analysis of Shakespeare's plays. I publish 16 of them. And I think the quote from Cliff Hilligast was,

J. Cole said, yes, I know. Yeah. He said, I want you to be the American distributor of these pamphlets, which I call Cole's Notes. And Clifton Hilligast said, all right, I'll give it a shot and started selling these things, publishing them and selling them in America. And what happened from Cole's Notes, Chuck? Well, first thing we should say is he took great risk. And I'm not like, you know,

weighing in one way or the other the ethics of any of this, but Hilligast did take upon great financial risk. He got a loan for $4,000 to make this happen, close to 50 grand today, and printed up 33,000 copies of these Kohl's notes himself, and he and his wife Catherine and their three young kids packed and shipped these things in their house out of their home for a little while, and were selling pretty good. This

Then what happened, Josh? Well, yeah. So they were paying royalties to Jet Coal. That was the setup. And within the first year, I guess Hill of Gas was like, nuts to that. I'm just going to rename these things Cliff Notes. Cliff's Notes. So they went from Coal's Notes to Cliff's Notes. I think the coal was heard to say, um...

And Cliff was like, I can't hear you. I'm down in Nebraska. So I just see people gloss over this all the time. Like it's I just don't understand why it's not at all controversial because he clearly just took he just lifted the intellectual property of Jack Cole and took it as his own. To be fair, he rewrote and phased out the Cole's note stuff. But the whole concept and even basically the name was the same.

Yeah, I would argue that maybe the name is intellectual property, but I think in a court of law, a judge would say like, you can't claim like doing a condensed version of a book as like an original idea that no one else can do. Because there were summaries before this. They didn't invent the idea of a literary summary. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. But if law and order has taught me anything, it's that you can't predict what a judge is going to rule.

No, that's true. And I do. I'm not like going to bat for Cliff. I'm just saying that I don't think that's one of those ideas you can say like, I hold the idea for condensing a long novel into a shorter version. No, I understand. And I'm not trying to like gun him down. I just haven't gotten my gotcha today. So that was it. I do feel bad for Cole, though, if it helps. I do, too. And I saw nowhere what his reaction was or what he did. I made up his quote of, um, that was a joke. Right.

But yeah, everybody just walks right past that stuff. Yeah, for sure. And I refuse to. Well, people, I feel like everyone is called out online for doing something like this. But old Cliff gets a pass, I guess, because everyone got through school because of him.

Yeah, that's the thing. So, yeah, this is not to paint him as a bad guy. If you want to know about him, he treasured letters that he got from students thanking him for helping them get through school, which you and I can attest getting a letter and email like that is really great. So I guess that makes us really great, too, if I'm saying that that makes him a good guy. Yeah.

That's wonderful. That really worked out. Yeah. He sold a lot of these pretty quickly, though. I do like how Livia put he gradually phased out the original material. It seemed like that happened within that first year. But he was it also I also couldn't find when he stopped paying the royalties. Was that during the first year or two? I'm guessing when it became Cliff's notes, he stopped paying royalties. Probably right.

But nevertheless, between the start of when he started doing that in August of 1958 and just yet six months later at the end of that year, he had sold 58,000 copies of these book summaries and pamphlets.

And by 1964, about six years later, he was doing all this on the side from the Nebraska Book Company. He was able to quit that job by 64. And just the 60s were a big decade period. He quit that job in 64. He changed the name in the 60s from Cliff's Notes without the apostrophe to Cliff's Notes. Big, big deal. And then he got divorced in 1966 and got remarried. Yeah, later on he got remarried to a woman named Mary.

Yeah. And I guess he adopted her two kids. Another thing that shows he's a stand-up guy. Really, the only blemish on his entire lifetime is how he treated Jack Cole. That's true. But did those kids' biological father get royalties on those children? He named them Cliff's kids. They were originally Jack Cole's because he stole his wife, Mary. Oh, man. And everyone just glosses right over that. Yep.

Should we take a break? Sure. All right. We'll take an early break here because this one's probably a little bit shorter and we'll talk about the early days of that company right after this. So get ready.

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So we should say, despite legendarily reading five books a week, Hillegas didn't write any of the CliffsNotes. He was more like the business guy. He had the idea, you would put in scare quotes, and he was running the whole operation. He had the vision for it, right? So he hired other people and initially hired literature teachers like hardcore writers.

Like like hardcore, like they have crew cuts and wear like army boots and stuff like that kind of lit teacher. But he realized something very quickly that I'm sure developed a hardcore lit teacher who's been teaching the same books, been teaching a scarlet letter for. I think we should not mention a single other book besides the scarlet letter in this episode. What do you think? Agreed. All right. Let's give it a shot.

These hardcore lit teachers who have been teaching The Scarlet Letter for 20 years. Technically, I just named another book, Chuck. For 20 years. These people know too much. They understand the book too well. They know all the details that they just get mired down when they're writing a synopsis or something. It's just too intense for the audience, which is high school and college readers, usually undergrad readers. Yeah.

Yeah, he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, pump your brakes. I'm trying to sell these to lazy kids. Exactly. Like, broad overview, please. He ended up with grad students mainly saying that they did the best work, which makes sense. Sure, they work for free, too. That's right. But we mentioned the iconic yellow and black design. That was something Cliff thought of himself.

I remember the Mountain Cliffs even being on the editions I had when I was, you know, a student in the 80s. I don't think they have that anymore, but they have these yellow and black stripes that just it looks I mean, it's a genius branding move just to do that simple little thing because CliffsNotes were so identifiable from from across a bookstore.

the night before a test or something, you could zoom over to that spinning rack of yellow and black pamphlets. Yeah, you'd walk in the bookstore and they'd call to you, don't bother, come by me. Yeah, exactly.

So one of the big things, I didn't know this, but one of the big reasons CliffsNotes became the brand that it is today, which is to say iconic, is because they advertise a lot in the 60s. And they very wisely went to where their readership was. They advertised in 17. They advertised in Playboy. They advertised in, well, the Scholastic Journal.

I don't know how much of a return on investment they got on that, but they also advertise in college newspapers. Bingo. Yeah. And so like if you're if you're going to high schoolers and college kids and saying, hey, we have something that you it's going to keep you from having to read a scarlet letter, the scarlet letter. Like, don't you want that? And they say, yes, I want that so bad. Like it just it just rooted that business and simultaneously made it take off like a rocket.

That's right. And you would open up the scarlet letter, Cliff's notes, and it would say the letter is A, the end. That's why I keep calling it a scarlet letter. Yeah, probably. Because it is literally A. A for awesome. No, not quite. One thing Cliff had in his corner was all his work for the Nebraska Book Company and being a traveling salesperson and all these relationships he had with bookstores because he

owned the market for this 80% of the market for guides to literature belong to cliff because that was just it I mean I think I think for a long time I mean competitors would come along and we'll talk about that but I think he had a number of years maybe even decades where everyone was just like well no there's there's already cliffs notes like why even bother mm-hmm he owns it right

That wasn't enough to keep people from coming along as competitors, but it does seem like they really didn't start to emerge until much, much later in history. Yeah. Like decades and decades on. Yeah, for sure. One of the things that CliffsNotes have long been criticized for, though, is like they write the book on –

The Scarlet Letter. And that's that. Like what you are reading could have been written by a grad student in 1968. Yeah. Even though you just bought this thing like last week. That's not the case any longer. It's changed hands and as it's changed hands several times, they've definitely been dusted off and brushed up and all those idioms. But for a very long time, it was like this is really old fashioned stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. Especially like the language they use, the points they're making. A lot of one of the things that CliffsNotes was known for is putting works of literature, specifically the Scarlet Letter, into a historical context. And that can change as people understand history more. But if you don't go update it, it's the understanding of it in 1968. Yeah, for sure. You know, we mentioned the 60s.

You just mentioned 68 for crying out loud. Yeah. Being kind of a big decade for the business, it was toward the end of that decade that things got a little rocky. It was around 1969 that a couple of things happened to sort of dampen the business, I guess, a little bit. And this is something I didn't know. But apparently, starting in 1969 and through the first bit of the 70s, the classics, people are like,

Hey, all these new teachers came along and like, hey, we don't need to read the Scarlet Letter anymore. We're going to read another unnamed book that's a little more current. And so the classics kind of fell off a little bit. And apparently a lot of high schools and colleges started the pass fail thing. So a kid wasn't as incentivized to ace a test. They were just incentivized to pass a test. So they're like, I don't even need the cliff notes. I can just kind of fake my way through and pass this thing. Right.

As a result, they dropped about a million bucks a year in sales up until like the mid 70s when they were like, oh, my God, what were we thinking? We got to put the Scarlet Letter back on the reading list and we have to grade these kids according to their grade. This pass fail thing is not doing anyone any favors. It's chaos.

It's chaos. Yeah, not only did they drop a million in sales, they dropped a million units in the mid-70s. I thought that was sales. No, like the number of sales that they made dropped from 2.8 million to 1.8 million. Oh, I was pretty sure that was dollars. And I'm sure... If you're positive that it's units, we'll move on. I'm 78% positive.

Oh, okay. Well, that tracks because I was 22% positive. Okay, good. Yeah, and Cliff Hilligass was like, you hippies for that huge loss in sales for the mid-70s. Yeah. So there was another stumble that they made, Cliff's Cassettes, which was a good idea if you ask me. Totally. It was Cliff's Notes, but in a cassette version that kids could pop into their Walkman and walk around listening to. Want to be lazier? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. You don't even have to walk around. You can lay there and listen to this stuff with your eyes closed and your hands soaking in palm olive. If you don't want to read the Scarlet Letter and you don't want to read the 47-page summary, how about you just pop in that cassette and lay on your bed and smoke some grass? Yeah, and listen to Ed Asner tell you what the Scarlet Letter means.

Oh, boy. Was that planned or did you just come up with that? I just came up with that. Oh, that's so great. This is only about a six month thing. It did not go over well, despite being a pretty good idea. That got me thinking about just audio books or books on tape and when that was a thing. Apparently that started in 1932. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The American Foundation for the Blind opened up a recording studio. So it was a thing, but I feel like it didn't really take off until much, much, much later. Until the Walkman.

Did you have a Walkman, by the way? Uh, yeah, of course I did. Nice. I did too. I associate it specifically with my cassette of Huey Lewis and the New Sports. One of the great records of all time. Yeah, it is really good. I don't think I ever had a Discman. I didn't either. I think I went straight from Walkman to...

To, geez, I guess iPod as far as walking around. Oh, yeah. I never had an iPod. I went from Walkman to iPhone, I guess. I had the first iPod. So, yeah, I had the first, not Steve Jobs' iPod, but the first edition.

I still have it. It still works. Oh, do you really? Wow. That's really saying something. Yeah. I put pictures of it on my Instagram not too long ago, actually, because I found it, charged it. And I just put up the opening screen because, you know, the first Walkman had everything in alphabetical order just on the screen when you opened it. And boy, it was eight or nine bands locked in time from, I guess, like 2000 or something, whatever that was. That's awesome. Yeah, I didn't have one of those. I'm sorry. I'm going to get you a maybe a nano. No need.

Those things were tiny, though. They were like the size of a thumb of steak. Yeah. Or a square of chocolate, actually. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. We'll keep going, right?

Yeah, I mentioned Hilligrass was a true corn husker. He kept that company in Nebraska. He felt very strongly about that and donated 10% of its profits to Nebraska organizations. Was a big curator of the arts, so the Museum of Nebraska Art was a big one that benefited from his stealing that idea from Colv.

And they have, if you've ever looked up, like, hey, what does this guy look like anyway? You might see a bronze statue of him, and that is from that Museum of Nebraska Art. Yeah, he's standing up in some bushes like a creep with a book open. What else? What happened in 1983? He, this is, I think this also kind of puts a certain, like, it paints a picture of this guy. That's what I'm trying to say. At age 65, on the dot, he retires.

OK, like that's just the kind of guy he was. But he didn't actually retire. He just stepped down from company president to the head of the board of directors. Yeah. And he still went into the office every day.

Yeah. And instead of calling him Mr. Hillegas, they said, you can call me Cliff. Right. He would show up in like a smoking jacket and ascot after he retired. Exactly. But he still called the shots. Right. But that's just, I mean, I can totally, because don't forget, he was trained in geology, math, physics. Like he had a certain way of looking at things for sure. Yeah. A couple of years later in 1985, there was a Chicago Tribune article saying,

So this is mid 80s. They had a staff of about 25 people and they had published 225 guidebooks or book guides, rather 60 million copies in circulation. And yes, I nailed it. Thirty nine countries in circulation. And apparently there were some countries that use them to help teach American English in different countries. Sure. Especially the English used by Americans in 1968.

That's right. By the end of the 80s, they were taking in about 11 million bucks a year, which is pretty good scratch. It's about 28 today. 28 million? Yeah, that's even better scratch. And by the end of the millennium in 1999, at the age of 81...

He sold it off. He was like, all right, I'm 81. I want to live out my remaining years as a super rich guy and not just a medium rich guy. So he sold to IDG Books, who was the publisher of the four dummies guides that everyone knows. And he sold for only 14 million, which kind of surprises me.

Fully retired and sadly died a couple of years later at 83 from complications of stroke. I've always wondered what that is. Like guys in particular retiring and then dying like very soon after that. It's kind of a thing. And even if you don't die...

You can like a lot of people just get like really sick for a while afterward. And I don't know if it's like you've been running on adrenaline last five years or what the deal is. But it's like when you when you finally your body finally resets, like I don't have to go to work anymore. Something happens to you. Are you saying this personally to me? So I can consider this as I wait my future.

It was bought and sold a few more times, though. In 2001, John Wiley and Sons bought the brand. They changed the name this time. This is when they squashed it together as CliffsNotes with a capital N. Then Houghton Mifflin Harcourt bought it in 2012, and then Course Hero bought it in 21. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense, too. Course Hero is an online tutor, essentially. They have courses, and they're heroes for it.

And one final thing before we take the break is it is I think The New York Times in the early aughts did a report and they found that it's not just lazy high school kids that are buying these books. They found out it's lazy adults in book clubs.

They just want to, they want to participate in a book club, but they maybe don't have the time to read the Scarlet Letter. So they'll get the CliffsNotes so they can go and have some wine and talk about the abridged version. Right. And you can tell the ones that read the CliffsNotes of the Scarlet Letter because they're the ones who thought it was really good. That's right. And it's also the yellow and black is sticking out from their fanny pack. They have a little piece of it in their teeth. Right. Yeah.

All right. Shall we take our second break? Yes. All right. We'll be back and pick up on where we are today with Cliff and his notes. There's nothing like sinking into luxury. Anabase sofas combine ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price.

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All right. As promised, we're going to talk about Cliff's Notes today. You can still buy these pamphlets. Like I said, I looked up online. If you want to buy the Scarlet Letter and hold it in your hand, I think it was $8.99, somewhere a little less, but they're kind of in that ballpark. Aren't they used, though? They're not newly printed. I don't know. I mean, they sell them on Amazon. That still could be used, I guess. That was my take that they're used, but who knows?

Maybe. I do know that their main source of income now is the website that offers most of this stuff for free, which is weird that they also have a fee model attached. Yeah. So you can subscribe to Cliff's Notes today for, I think, nine dollars a month or thirty six bucks a year.

And you get all of the free stuff, but you can also download it as a PDF. So if you learn better by like reading in on print or on paper, you would need to do that. But they also have other stuff, too. There's like much more in-depth guides and analysis and stuff like that behind their paywall. So it's not like you're just a total sucker for paying for free CliffsNotes because they have a bunch of stuff that's not just free.

Yeah, and I got, we're not going to go through this list, but Livia was kind enough, I think, because she needed to fill a word count to list out what you get in the actual free version of, let's say, the Scarlet Letter. And my take is that you get a pretty good, like, summary and chapter by chapter thing and character analysis and all that stuff. But it's just even a lesser version than the more robust paid monthly. Right. Yeah.

I mean, it's even more like there's pretty good detail in it. Like for their analysis of The Scarlet Letter, they talk about how The Scarlet Letter fits into dystopian fiction in general. Yeah. Or how Big Brother in The Scarlet Letter can be compared to Hitler or Stalin. Yeah. Or when Hester Prynne develops newspeak, what all that means. Yeah, exactly. And a biography of George Orwell, the writer of The Scarlet Letter. That's right.

Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff I went in and poked around, and it is a lot of free stuff. Like you could write numerous really good slam dunk papers on the Scarlet Letter just from the free stuff that they have available. So I'm a little curious, too, what their business model is because it doesn't really make sense to me unless it's a portal to Course Hero now that I think about it. I'll bet it is. I'll bet they get you with the free stuff.

And then they get you into Course Hero and they turn you upside down and shake you by your ankles until all the change falls out of your pockets. Do you want to be a better student for nine bucks a month? Yeah. So we should talk a little bit more about the elephant in the room, which is that this is just a way for kids to cheat. I mean, the other elephant is we haven't discussed our own Cliff Notes, Cliff's Notes use. I will volunteer my own. You don't have to answer. I've never used them.

OK, well, go ahead and just make me look bad right before I say that I leaned on them. No, worse than that. I never I didn't even bother to use the CliffsNotes. I didn't read the material either. Oh, I was just a really, really lame high school student in high school. I was not good at all. I didn't blossom until college.

Okay, I do remember that now, but you were setting me up to look like a chump. No, I swooped in and saved you. Thank you. Like Hester Brand did in The Scarlet Letter. That's right. I did use Cliff's notes, not exclusively. I was always a believer, and this is not right, kids, of I love to read. I was an English major for heaven's sake. I know. So I love to read, but I wanted to read what I wanted to read. Emily still sort of

challenges me not on just reading, but like Chuck only does what he wants to do. That kind of thing. That's not the best trade, everybody. You should not be like Chuck. But I wanted to read what I wanted to read. I didn't want to read The Scarlet Letter. So I got the CliffsNotes and, you know, probably perused The Scarlet Letter. The books that I was like, I totally want to read that. I can't think of another book title like The Scarlet Letter.

Yeah, I would read that scarlet letter. I wouldn't read the one they assigned to me. So I did use CliffsNotes. I did. That was in high school. Did not use them in college as an English major because I felt like it was time to get a little more serious. And I chose that major willingly. So I should probably do the work. Right. And that was the only work in college I really, really enjoyed was reading and writing. So I didn't use them in college.

But all that to say the elephant in the room is like, is this just for lazy kids? And you mentioned that Hillegas was like, no, but how would he enforce that or encourage that rather? With a stern note at the beginning of every copy of CliffsNotes.

He had a little note. His signature was next to it, too. He said that a thorough appreciation of literature allows no shortcuts, and students who use them to avoid reading the actual material or having to go into class for discussion groups about the material are denying themselves the very education that they are presumably giving their most vital years to achieve.

And I feel like he took a bit of a utopian approach to how he viewed his customers. But surely there were some out there. I do wonder if there is a single CliffsNotes buyer who read that note and was like, you know what? I'm going to change my ways. I'm abusing these things.

I doubt it, but I'm sure there were students like I did at times where a book was a little over their head and they used the CliffsNotes as intended to help with the book. I saw also that some teachers did that. They actually suggested CliffsNotes for some students, which meant that your teacher thought you were a dipstick.

Well, teachers also were on record as using it for lesson planning sometimes because they didn't want to read the Scarlet Letter either. That's really hilarious. That's so Mrs. Krabappel.

It totally is. And then a lot of them actually use CliffsNotes for the opposite reasons. They would know, like if you're a high school English teacher, there's a handful of the scarlet letters that you've assigned during the year and you assign the same scarlet letters over and over again year after year.

So you probably know the CliffsNotes on those things by heart. So you can very easily pick out when somebody is not only using the CliffsNotes, but way worse than that is actually plagiarizing the CliffsNotes. That is the laziest thing you could possibly do prior to chat GPT writing your paper for you.

Yeah, this is coming from two Gen Xers, and we wrote the book on how to get away with lazy. Yeah, I didn't even read the material or the CliffsNotes. That's pretty lazy. Yeah.

certain universities took charge, uh, in 1997, Villanova pulled CliffsNotes from their college bookstore. Um, other bookstores maybe didn't sell them, but they're the only one that Livvy could find at least that actually pulled them off the shelves. Yeah. They, they very famously sent in a hit squad that ended up trashing the bookstore and tore up all of the CliffsNotes. And, uh, when they left, they threw flashbang grenades into the bookstore as they took off. And yelled, hut, hut, hut. Uh,

Cliff did not like this. And they took out a full page ad. I guess he was passed away by this point. But the company didn't like this. And they took an ad in the Villanova student newspaper, called it censorship. And the college was like, they can still buy these things anywhere. This is sort of a symbolic gesture. Calm down. Yeah. We kind of touched on, and we didn't say it like overtly, but there were a lot of teachers out there who were okay with Cliff's notes and some who even encouraged their use.

That seems to have come along like a generation after CliffsNotes came out, which is not coincidental because a lot of those people who grew up to be English teachers and English professors used CliffsNotes when they went through school themselves. So at the very least, they had a certain fondness of it. And at best, they were like, this is actually super helpful as a reference material. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. And if you have a set of Cliff's notes that you have read recently from later in the company's story, you're like, hey, man, I didn't see any note from Cliff saying these aren't shortcuts. P.S. Enjoy the shortcut. This didn't have anything in it. I think the minute he sold that company, they were like, let's get rid of that note. It's a real drag. Yeah, it's a real drag. And not only that, like our advertising should actively be

encourage the fact that this is a shortcut. Yeah, that's pretty much what they did. Let's own it. Yeah. And they did own it. I think they kind of walked it back a little bit. So there's like a watered down version of his note, essentially saying the same thing. But they definitely did. They said the unspoken part out loud, I guess is how they put it.

Yeah, for sure. Here's the big question, though, and I'm glad Olivia posed this question. Like, is it bad to use CliffsNotes? And the very idea of, like, do kids need to read the Scarlet Letter?

Or is the only reason they're reading the scarlet letter to just not not look like a dipstick When someone brings up the scarlet letter like do you just need to be acquainted with this stuff as a cultural? Touchpoint in life or to get a jeopardy answer correct, or I'm sorry a jeopardy clue correct nice catch We almost got our membership revoked

And, you know, this is me speaking. I think, yeah, like you should read these books. And a lot of people are on record saying, yeah, I mean, not necessarily just the Scarlet Letter, but it's I believe there's a literature scholar from the University of Kentucky who

Alan Nadell that calls it the labor of witnessing. Like to actually read the thing is the thing. It's not reading the Wikipedia. I think she found a Redditor, East TX Josh, that said it's like reading the Wikipedia on Beethoven's Ninth but not listening to it. There's something about experiencing the thing that is different and valuable. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And reading all this, Chuck, made me realize how much I missed out by not reading all those books in high school. You still can, buddy. Right. So I went on a couple of like I searched books you should read before you die. And that brought up numerous lists. And there's some that appear on all the lists. And I'm still searching for which The Scarlet Letter I'm going to read. But a single book. Yeah. If you have any recommendations for one to start with, let me know.

Well, you know, it would be fun as our mutual friend, Joey Ciara of the Henry Clay people who are friends who wrote and performed the theme song to our television show and still a good friend. I'm going to see he's going to Glengarry with me this weekend. Very nice. He is a Moby Dick aficionado and collects copies and versions of that. And he said that is the best book of all time. He said it's not my favorite book. He said it's the best book.

You mean the Scarlet Letter, the one with the great white whale? Oh, that's right. I got the name wrong. So sorry. Yeah. All right. Yeah, I saw that one. I was like, I don't know. It might be fun if we both read that. Okay. I have a feeling you're going to be like, you're still reading that two years from now.

Well, let's put it this way. Joey gave me a copy probably two years ago, and it sits untouched on my shelf. All right. You give me a two-year head start, and then you start, and we'll finish at the same time and talk about it. I've got to put down this Mike Campbell book of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and the R.E.M. one before that, and the Mudhoney one before that. All I read is these rock books. I need to put them all away. And by the way, those are all called The Scarlet Letter. Right. My story in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Right.

And also, Chuck, I mean, if rock and roll rots your brain, reading about rock and roll really does. Should we mention one more point that teachers make? Or I'm sorry, that problem with study guides. Some people are like, hey, these study guides just give you one lens to look through to view this thing. And what you need to do is read the book and go to a class and hear it from a teacher. But some people say, yeah, but that teacher is just looking at it through their lens. Right.

I disagree. As an English major in my classes, the teacher would present perhaps their analysis and then say, this is what other people think. And what do you think? Right. And you have to have read the CliffsNotes to say what you think. What else? You want to talk about any of these parodies or spinoffs or competitors? Yeah. I mean, we can just mention kind of quickly SparkNotes became the biggest competitor in like 1999. Mm-hmm.

There's one called Shmoop founded in 2008 that became a pretty good competitor. That's pretty good. I went and read some of their stuff. It's much more loosely written, like what's up with yada, yada, yada. Oh, really? What's up with that letter A? Interesting. I do want to mention this one spoof at least, Thug Notes. Yeah, it's great. Did you watch any of these? I watched the one on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

I think you mean The Scarlet Letter. Man, I got it too. We both went down. Thug Notes is on YouTube. I was talking about the movie. Oh, right, right, right. It's a YouTube series from comedian Greg Edwards. He plays a character, a PhD named Sparky Sweets.

who summarizes commentary on 100 different books. They're generally about five minutes long, and it's a comedy thing. You know, it's Thug Notes. He does African-American vernacular and breaks down these books in a fun way

in a very quick way, but he's got 3.14 million subs. And if you watch one of these like you did, you will soon learn, like, it's a joke, but he's laying down some real truth on some of these as well. Oh, yeah. Like, when you finish watching one of these Thug Notes, like, you understand what that book was about, like, fully. Like, he does a great job with it. But, yeah, there's just this whole shtick to it that's pretty awesome, too. Yeah, I watched a few of them, but the one on The Scarlet Letter by George Orwell...

At the end, in the analysis, he explains, he talks about censorship and book burning and Stalinism and double talk and all that stuff in a very fun way. And I can only think that like,

There might be young students that identify with Greg Edwards and what he's doing, that it might provide a little real insight and inspiration. I hope so. Even though it's just a joke. Did you say the name of his character on Thug Notes? I did. I love it. I guess that's about it, huh? That's all I got on Cliff's Notes. Okay. I think, man, hats off to us. Hats off to Olivia. Hats off to Mental Floss. Hats off to Sparky Sweets, Ph.D.,

We made it through Cliff's notes. - Hats off to Nathaniel Hawthorne. - Yeah, and Hester Prynne too. - Yeah. - Let's see, since we took our hat off to Hester Prynne, of course that means it's time for Listener Mail. - Hey guys, this is about Broadway. My name's Reagan, I've been a listener for 10 years. My husband Paul and I love to listen to you guys while we cook dinner.

And we listen to reruns on long car trips. I'm writing in because Broadway, the Broadway episode, because I am a theatrical costume designer and I wanted to offer some more insight about previews that you guys were discussing.

Previews have a cool function where they are actually used by the production team to keep changing, like Josh said, and fine-tuning a show based on audience feedback, especially on a brand new show. New lines and music may even be written and added during the process. Changes can also include restaging and cutting or adding technical elements like costumes or props. However, Chuck was right in that toward the end of previews, the

The show will be frozen by the director, which means no further changes are allowed to be made. And it's after that time that critics will be invited to attend during previews, after they're frozen, before opening night.

Got it. So that totally clears it up. Thanks for doing such a great job covering Broadway. It really touched me to hear about the theater world on my favorite podcast because I listen to you guys almost daily in the costume shop. And that is from Reagan McKay, interim costume shop manager at the Roundhouse Theater. Wow, that's awesome. I think we talked about the Roundhouse Theater, didn't we? It sounds familiar. I hope we did. Thank you very much, Reagan. We love it when we hear from experts in the field about an episode we talked about, especially when they say we got it right.

And if you want to be like Reagan and send us an email where you're like, hey, I know what I'm talking about and you guys did a good job. We love that kind of thing. You can send it to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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