Slam Books

The mechanics were simple and dangerous: the keeper of the notebook wrote a question at the top of each page — crushes, favorites, and, inevitably, what everyone really thought of specific classmates — then passed it around for contributors to fill in their answers. Because nobody signed what they wrote, the slam book delivered something school life otherwise never allowed: total honesty, with all the cruelty that implies. Getting the book handed to you was a thrill; finding your own name at the top of a page was a stomach drop.

The fad is far older than the 90s kids who thought they invented it. The term was defined as early as 1922, in a slang glossary called The Vocabulary of Jazzdom, as "a diary in which you 'knock' your friends," and a New Jersey newspaper reported slam books as a hot new fad at New Brunswick High School in 1928. The notebooks kept circulating through American schools for decades — the record notes their popularity in Black high-school communities of the 1950s — and television took notice long before the 90s, with The Facts of Life building an episode, "Kids Can Be Cruel," around one in the 80s.

The 90s were the paper slam book's last great era. By the 2000s the format had migrated online, where anonymous question-and-answer cruelty no longer needed a spiral binding — the slam book is often described as the analog precursor to anonymous internet trolling. Which is the whole nostalgia of the thing: it was the internet's meanest invention, decades early, in Bic pen.