I am guessing I bought this during my time at the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library Booktique. Maybe “bought” is a strong word: the Booktique was a storefront in a dying mall that served as the release valve for all the donations TSCPL received throughout the year. It was mainly staffed by volunteers, and as one of them this was the situation I was put into:

• I would sift through boxes of books donated to the Booktique
• I would decide what was or was not “salable”
• I would decide what a “fair” price for the “salable” books
• I would get first pick of the books, at a volunteer discount off of what I determined was a fair price
• I would then be trusted to ring myself up and place the proper amount of money in the cash box

It was an expressway to free or effectively books. I took full advantage of it, and ended up shipping box upon box of mostly worthless books back to my parents’ house when I went to college. Many of them have since been donated to some New Jersey public library, but a distressing number of them still fill up my Brooklyn apartment, Terry the Friendly Dragon Helps You to Be AIDS Smart but one of them. Its heart is certainly in the right place, with a tale of children ready to exclude an HIV positive child from their baseball game before a knowledge-bearing dragon swoops in.

Except… Terry doesn’t really tell the kids anything about AIDS. He repeats the familiar advice that you can’t get AIDS from shaking hands or playing with an HIV positive person, but then veers into a series of weird activity pages advising kids about healthy practices that have nothing to do with AIDS: wash your hands, take daily baths, put bandages on cuts and scrapes, get immunized against measles, never talk to strangers. It implicitly undermines the whole “you can’t get AIDS from normal contact” by packing the book full of tips more suited to keep you from getting a cold.

And why a Friendly Dragon? He doesn’t do anything very dragonlike. He flies, I guess.

You can read the whole book here, as it seems to be long out of print. If whoever owns Terry would prefer the book not be available online, please let me know.