Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-24300543-20190603214645/@comment-27666463-20190603231010

I have #44 (ISBN 059086933) and #56 (ISBN 0590212451) of this type and I know there is one of #7 as well, but I don't own it (#7 says "Scholastic Special Edition" on the back cover, but 44 and 56 don't). I have been looking into different editions and publishing details of various goosebumps books as well as other scholastic books, and here is my best guess: I believe these books are effectively Scholastic School Market Editions, but were not called that at the time, because they didn't have a particular name then.

By "scholastic school market editions" I mean books that would be ordered out of book order catalogs, or by teachers who were ordering in bulk and wanted cheaper editions of the books (or simply would be sent books with ads for collector's clubs scholastic wanted kids to subscribe to). Since these particular goosebumps books are smaller they would be cheaper to produce, which would be ideal for schools. In addition, they don't have barcodes or prices, unlike the regular editions, presumably because they don't need to be scanned when purchased, in contrast to buying books at a book store.

I believe there are quite a few books that could be considered proto-"school market editions" but after June 1997 or so they started to be specifically labelled as "school market editions". I have never seen a book labelled a school market edition published before June 1997 (and more commonly this label started around the fall of 1997). #44 was first published in June 1996 and #56 was first published in June 1997. #7 was first published in May 1993, and it is labelled a "Scholastic Special Edition". I believe that label was dropped after 1993 though. I also own a Baby-sitters Club book labelled a "Scholastic Special Edition" on the back cover, published in June 1993. The only difference between that and the regular (besides the thickness) was the special edition had an ad for the fan club, and the regular one didn't. I don't know about #7 goosebumps though.

You may be interested in my article, Goosebumps_(original_series)/Printing_differences, where I talk about the different publications of Goosebumps books (I'm not done yet with what I want to say, so I haven't yet gotten to the #44 and #56 books discussed here). However, I do have front and back cover images and tables of the books #47-#53 which include stickers and the ones which don't. The ones that have stickers have a different ISBN and no barcode on the back cover, compared to the ones that do not have stickers (in both cases, these are first printings). I believe the ones with stickers were sold in Book Order Catalogs, and the ones without were sold in bookstores. However, proving this is virtually impossible because as far as I know, nobody saved book order catalogs and they are very rare to find scans/pictures of.

However, some low quality scans are scattered throughout the web. One picture which supports my theory is this: https://i.redd.it/8k78c2bv2fe01.jpg which is the May 1995 Scholastic Arrow book order advertising Original Series #32 The Barking Ghost with the text "Free Poster Inside!" You may know that there are two editions of that book, one comes with a poster and the first printing of the other comes with a "terrifying tattoo". For that book, the edition with the poster has a different ISBN and no barcode on the back cover, and that is indeed the one advertised in the book order catalog.

Anyway, tl;dr: if there is not barcode on the back, that's probably because it was ordered through a catalog and not a bookstore, either by a student through book orders, or by a teacher ordering a huge quantity all at once more cheaply.