From the Good Mountain: How Gutenberg Changed the World is an artistic testimony of how one man’s visionary idea and tenacious fortitude forever altered the way the world communicates. And, from the eye of an educator, James Rumford’s biography of Johannes Gutenberg is lapis-stoned, madder-planted, saffron-stamened gold mine (pg. 23). The way Rumford built suspense around the materials used to make the first book is masterful. And, that his illustrations are both historically sound and comically personable serve as an invitation for today’s iPad-toting young reader to take a historic stroll down memory lane in celebration of the world of publishing’s baby steps toward ultimate world influence.
Rumford’s complete body of work is founded on commemorating the accomplishments of those that have come before us. He’s also committed to equipping educators with the tools needed to enrich their students in artistically factual ways. His website is brimming with thoughtful, appropriate, and useful guides to compliment his books – most especially an extensive fully-illustrated, 152 page companion guide to The Good Mountain: How Gutenberg Changed the World. Develop an appreciation for Gutenberg’s world-altering passion through offering this phenomenal biography, partnered with the companion guide, to your techno-savvy kids today.
Authors and illustrators are as different from one another as the people they seek to bring alive in their books. This month, the talented and artistic James Rumford provides a glimpse not only into the life of Gutenberg, but into his own quirky attitudes, as well. His Dear Reader letter is one written as if to himself at 14 from his present age of 64.
I am supposed to answer a lot of questions for this blog about me, when I was a kid. I thought it would be fun to pretend that I had written this way back when I was in fourth grade, addressing it to me in the future.
Dear Future Me (to be opened when you’re 64),
If you waited until you were 64, you’ll probably need glasses to read this. Maybe I should have written this with larger letters??!!
Maybe you are married (yuck!) and have kids. Anyway, this is Rumpy. Remember? The kids used to call you that!
I’d say that things are going fine. I’m in the fourth grade at Buffum Elementary School in Long Beach. My teacher is Mr. Shim. He’s from Hawaii and he’s Chinese. We’re learning about China.
My brother Sydney goes to Buffum, too. He’s a year and a half older. He’s doesn’t like his teacher at all. Kids make fun of my brother a lot because he has big ears. Some kids are mean.
My best friend is Timmy McDuffie. His brother Tommy is my brother’s best friend. We do stuff together like pay dodge ball or baseball.
Timmy likes to draw like I do. We often make pictures together. This year for his birthday I gave him some special watercolor paints, real ones that artists use. My dad helped me pick them out because he draws and paints real well, too. I’d say that Timmy and I draw something just about everyday.
Timmy, Tommy, my brother and I also like to collect butterflies, and coins and stamps. My dad takes us to the Long Beach Stamp and Coin Club. We like seeing all of the neat stuff.
A few months ago, you probably remember, you had to have an operation on your stomach. (I hope you’re not wondering what that long scar is….you can’t be that old, can you?) Anyway, you were out of school for a few weeks. All of the kids sent you letters with funny pictures to help you get well.
Anyway, old Mr. Rumpy, or old Mr. Jimmy or whatever they’ll call you in the future, I just wanted to say hi.
From your friend from the past,
Me.
Here I am now. (I do wear glasses, but I took them off for the photo. I’m holding them in my hands.)
People call me Jim nowadays. I am happily married—to Carol, going on forty-three years now. We live in Honolulu, Hawaii. We have one son, Jonathan, who was also once called Rumpy or Rumphy. He now lives in Los Angeles. He’s a dj and music composer.
From time to time I still see Mr. Shim. My brother Syd had his ears fixed when he had to have plastic surgery after being wounded in Viet Nam. No one would call him “big ears” anymore. He still goes to the Stamp and Coin Club in Long Beach. I have lost contact with Timmy McDuffie.
After I graduated from college, my wife and I joined the Peace Corps and went to Chad and Afghanistan. We were teachers. I suppose that I’d still be a teacher today, had I not met a retired librarian named Harriett Oberhaus, who encouraged me to write and illustrate my first children’s book, The Cloudmakers, back in 1996. Since then I have written and illustrated over twenty books.
Some of the books I have written took me only an hour to write. Others took five years. Some of the pictures that I painted or drew were done in an hour, but others took months. Each book is different. Each book has its own special challenges. Even so, I’d say the hardest thing for me is doing the pictures. It isn’t easy getting the picture I see in my head to “appear” on the paper. Drawing takes a lot of practice.
One of my most recent books is about Johannes Gutenberg, the man who first printed books from pieces of type in the West. It only took me an hour or so to write the story, but it took me two years to draw and paint all of the pictures. I used my computer a lot to help me get the detail that I wanted.
Why did I write about Gutenberg? First he was one of the most influential men of the last one thousand years. He made it possible to mass produce books, and he and the printers and publishers that followed him were responsible for raising the literacy rates in the world. Before him, perhaps only ten per cent of the people knew how to read. Because of his invention and all of the improvements that followed, some countries now have a literacy rate over ninety per cent.
I also wrote the book because I wanted to tell people about a technology that has almost disappeared. Commercial printers don’t print from lead type. The presses they use are high speed and are controlled by computers. Nothing is as it was when Gutenberg printed books in 1450. And now the internet and the computer are making books completely digital.
After I wrote From the Good Mountain, I decided to write a companion guide. The guide is also called From the Good Mountain, but it has a subtitle: A Companion Guide for Adults & Children: How Books Were Made in the Fifteenth Century. It is a book of over 150 pages with all kinds of drawings and diagrams. It is for the very curious who want to know more about Gutenberg’s life and the way books were made in the fifteenth century.
I should say that there are people who still print books the old fashioned way….like me. I have type and I have a printing press. Sometimes I set type and print up a few copies. It is a lot of hard work, but the results are ten times more beautiful to me that anything you can see in a bookstore today. Why? Because the words are pressed into the paper and the book seems to have a three-dimensional quality to it. Here is my printing press, an iron Albion made in Japan in 1900. You can find out more about my press at manoapress.com.
Where I have my printing press is also where I write and paint. My studio was the original garage to the house we live in. I remodeled it a few years ago and gave it nice windows that look out on the yard and the hill behind our house. I love to sit here and think, watch the clouds race by, and marvel at the gentle rain falling like stars in the sunlight.
Biographies are about people who have done extraordinary things and/or changed the world in some unique way. Kids connect with the fact that a biography’s subject, whether famous, or from far away, or even from the past, is just like them in many ways. And we can all be inspired by a glimpse of the path a person traveled when faced with obstacles and challenges. This month on ReaderKidZ, we’ll recommend outstanding biographies for young readers of all ages, starting with:
What could any one person do that could truly change the world? Books! Gutenberg developed the printing press and in doing so made books, reading, and education accessible to many rather than the elite few. For the first time the “common man” and eventually women, slaves, and minorities had the opportunity to learn, read, and then to write, express, protest, even cause revolutions.
In this picture book, written as a series of riddles, questions are asked then answered in the classic “call and response” format. Illustrations are done in the style of medieval manuscripts with layers of hidden information to discover. This is a biography to read and re-read with pleasure and surprise.
Be sure to check back next week to read an interview with James Rumford and learn more about FROM THE GOOD MOUNTAIN!
I don’t think anyone knows for sure how it happens that books sharing a similar theme – published by different houses – seem to come out in the same, or nearly the same, year. But it does happen. Earlier this month, ReaderKidZ featured Joan Bauer’s newest book, ALMOST HOME, about a young girl, Sugar Rae, who finds herself in foster care after her mother’s breakdown. Today, we’ll look at several others about kids in foster care.
Stella’s mom’s got a ways to go in the reliability and parenting department and while she’s getting her act together, Stella will be spending the summer with her Great Aunt Louise on Cape Cod. Not wanting Stella to be alone, Aunt Louise has taken in Angel, another foster child.
The two girls are like oil and water and while Louise is kind and loving, it doesn’t seem possible that all that goodness will be enough to turn those girls into friends. But when tragedy strikes early on, Stella and Angel are left to fend for themselves and decide, once and for all, if they can count on one another long enough to pull themselves through.
Inspired by a true story (read it HERE), Touch Blue is about a small town off the coast of Maine that arranged for foster kids to live on the island in order to boost the school population and ensure that the school stay open for another year. Sisters, Tess and Libby, are looking forward to sharing their beautiful island with Aaron, the foster child who’ll be joining their family. But will Aaron and the other foster children be able to embrace island life? And, more importantly, can Tess and those closest to her convince Aaron that he’s as much a part of their family as they are? And will he ever, truly, feel as much an islander as the rest?
For those teachers looking for other books about foster families, check out, ONE FOR THE MURPHYS, by Lynda Mullaly Hunt (Nancy Paulson Books/Penguin, 2012), PICTURES OF HOLLIS WOODS, by Patricia Reilly Giff (Wendy Lamb Books, 2002), WAITING FOR NORMAL by Leslie Connor (Katherine Tegen Books, 2008) and, a classic, THE GREAT GILLY HOPKINS, by Katherine Paterson (Crowell, 1978).
Every autumn for the past 30 years, the American Library Association has celebrated your right to read whatever you choose with an event called Banned Books Week. Banned books are materials that have been removed from a library “based upon the objections of a person or group… thereby restricting the access of others.” You have the freedom to decide for yourself and for your family if a book is worth your reading time, and this freedom is a liberty librarians defend daily. Take a look at the following books that have been banned from a library – can you guess why someone argued that you should not be allowed to read this book?
Challenged, but retained at the Union, Okla. District elementary school libraries (2009) despite a parent’s complaint that the book features two same-sex couples and their children.
The Gwinnett County, Ga. school board (2006) rejected a parent’s pleas to take Harry Potter books out of school libraries, based on the claim they promote witchcraft. The Georgia Board of Education ruled December 14 that the parent had failed to prove her contention that the series “promote[s] the Wicca religion,” and therefore that the book’s availability in public schools does not constitute advocacy of a religion.
Source: ala.org/advocacy retrieved October 18, 2012
The ReaderKidZ have been talking all month about “Families in Change” and there have been many terrific recommendations. Books about a child living in foster care, the difficulties of divorce, the loss of a family member to cancer, the reality of life in a war-zone.
But today’s book takes a entirely different (and lighter) tone. Yes, it’s about siblings – John, the pragmatic brother and Abigail, his incredibly bright, crossword-whiz sister. It’s also about a family in change – a mother who’s been ill and who dies at the story’s beginning. But with a snarky narrator, reminiscent of Lemony Snicket, (“You will have to bear with me, Reader. I have never done this sort of thing before – written books, told stories to complete strangers who, frankly, I may not particularly like. Yes, I am referring to you. Would I like you if I met you? I’m not sure I would.”) and a mystery that begs to be solved, it’s entirely fun, quirky, and entertaining.
The Templeton Twins Have an Idea is the first in a series that’s sure to hook kids from the very first page and have them impatiently waiting for the twins’ next daring adventure. Learn more at www.thetempletontwins.com. (Grades 2 and up)
Mission Statement
To provide teachers, librarians, and parents with the resources and inspiration to foster a love of reading in kids, K-5.
