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The agonizing boredom of family car trips was a thing that kids dreaded with each slam of the car door. Fortunately, the hours staring straight ahead with no one to talk to except your family could be relieved with the good ol’ Yes & Know books, a collection of fun games and groovy invisible ink pens that made that “alone with myself” time a lot more fun.

 

The first “Magic Pen” books were introduced by Lee Publications in the mid-‘70’s. They contained an array of different games, but they all had one thing in common – the magic pen. Yes & Know book pages were mostly white, but by rubbing the pen’s yellow tip across certain spots on the paper, words and other objects would magically appear.

 

The games were simple and easy to follow. The most common was a multiple choice trivia game, where the correct answer was revealed when you drew your pen over it. You could also play football, baseball, and bowling, and the pen would let you know your hits, yardage, scores, etc. Other popular games were hangman, tic-tac-toe, Fleet (a Battleship-type game), matching games, a maze game, and the detective game, “Line Up.” All of the games were designed to be played solo, but if you weren’t fighting with your siblings you could play the trivia game with them. If you weren’t into games, you could also just enjoy the “Magic Pen Painting Books”, which just contained pages to color with your magic pen.

 

Yes & Know books touted their universal appeal (for ages 8 – 108!), but the fact was that they were a genuinely entertaining way to spend some down time until the next pit stop on the highway.