Century Books
This quote from the sd-callers list:
The very worst callers are the ones you put in your Century book at convention, then you can know that you don’t want to go to their dances again 🙂
started me thinking about square dance Century Books. These are basically autograph books, where dancers collect callers’ autographs. I’ve signed a few and felt mildly flattered…but now I’m wondering if maybe I should feel insulted
There’s very little online on Century Books. There are a couple of sites with definitions of square dancing terms:
and a couple of European (non-English) sites (maybe explaining strange American square dance customs?).
There’s also a reference in the publicly-accessible sd-callers archves from 1997 in an ever-recurring thread on partner/neighbor trade from waves:
What would happen? Probably most of the dancers would ignore the word “partner” and the sides would trade with each other. They might also make a notation in their Century Book, “Don’t attend any more of his dances.” Whenever I dance to a different caller and get his sig, I also grade them on a scale of A – F.
I’ve never been tempted to have a Century Book myself, since I rarely get a chance to dance to that many callers over the course of x period of time. At first I was flattered to sign Century Books years ago, but nowadays, the only ones that seem to have them are the more “unusual” type of dancer. I hate to think I was signing the ONLY so they would know to avoid me! Eek!
We travel all over the United States and just graduated from mainstream. We thought it would be nice to have a book to see the places where we have danced. Do you know where I can get one of these books. Thank you
What kills me about signing someones century book is that they usually don’t have a pen with them and then most of them don’t even say thank you. That is just plain rude. I wait until they are beginning to walk away and then I say “your welcome”. They usually just look at me with an expression that makes me believe they have no idea why I said it. Oh well. Have we completely lost all of our manners?