 Hello, my name is Roger Jelonek, I'm your host for Think Tech Book World, and my guest today is James Rumford, a fabulous children's book writer, and so let's get to it. Jim, how did you start? Before you, before you, you started very late, so where did you come from? Before I answer that, just thank you for having me on this show, and where did I come from and how did I get started? I grew up in California, but I've lived here for about 40 years, and I got started in writing and illustrating children's books about a little over 20 years ago. That's pretty late, I mean you were not in your coming out of art school to doing it. No, in fact I never went to art school. I think it, the realization came many years after I had published my first book that I had always wanted to be a children's book writer and illustrator. And as it was materializing, I guess what I had dreamed all along, I came to understand, gee, this is what you've always wanted to do, and now you get to do it, so it just took an awful long time to get to that point in my life. So what, how did the first one come about? I, where I worked there was a retired librarian, and one day she said, aren't you going to write a children's book? I said, no, she said, why not? I have no ideas. And she said, you must have ideas, and I do not know why even to this day, I told her a story. She encouraged me to write it down. Then she said, I bet you can draw pictures. Why don't you draw the pictures for it? And pretty soon, it was finished, and then she said, what are you going to do with it? And I said, I don't know. And it was my wife who said, you got money for stamps, send it to a publisher. So I looked in the library for the books I liked, and they were all published by Houghton Mifflin in Boston, and I said, okay, I'm going to send it to them. So I did. And two months later, they sent me a contract. Fantastic. I didn't realize it at the time, but yes, it doesn't happen all the time. Fantastic start. So you've written 25 children's books? Yes, about 25. They're on every conceivable subject. Not every conceivable, but a lot of them. And so that's the cardinal sin you've committed, which is to never do the same book twice, which publishers hate, because how do you sell a different author every time? But which just tell us about some of your adventures, because they really are adventures. What I have to say, too, when you said publishers really hate it, that might be so, but I know that the salesman really liked it. Because when I go back for a sales meeting in Boston, or you talk to the salesman, they say, oh, we are so glad that you write for us because we never know what you're going to give us. And it makes it a lot more fun to go out to these bookstores and schools with your book. I thought that was a very nice thing for them to say. I don't know if it materialized in a lot of money, but, yeah, it... But you, early on, were in the Peace Corps? Yes. And where were you in the Peace Corps? I was in, we were in two places. One was in Chad in the middle of Africa. And so some of my books are based on that. This one is based on being in Chad. And so is this one, the Kalabash Cat. And there are some others I've written to that are based on my experience there. And after Chad, we went for one year to Afghanistan. This was before all of the troubles and things, mainly because I knew how to speak Persian. And I had a friend in high school who was from Iran, which was an unheard of thing then, in Los Angeles. Now, Los Angeles is little Tehran, so it's totally different. I like languages, so I started learning something from him and also he would invite me home to his house where his mother cooked delicious Persian food. So that helps a lot. And then after that, I decided to get a graduate degree in Persian at Berkeley. And I got a year into it and said, you know what, what's the point of this? And so then, I'm seven or eight years later, I, we went to Afghanistan for one year and then came back. And I then went to Rwanda in Africa through the Fulbright. So I don't have any books here about Afghanistan. There's a few in my head, but they haven't come out yet. And I don't know. But you've done books of numerous different cultures, quite different from each other. And you've generally learned at least the basic language in each case. Sometimes, yes, sometimes, yes. I really like different cultures. I like different languages. And I try and put this in these books because, you know, somebody said to me, well, who are you writing for? And I decided that I'm writing for little Jimmy Rumpford. Yeah. These are the books I would have wanted to see on the shelf when I was a kid. And I'm assuming there must be a few more like me, you know. And I'm hoping to encourage others who are interested in different cultures, who are interested in different languages, who are interested in times and places that are so different from the times and places that the child or the reader lives in. But we're running into a period now where there's anti-immigrant passion and there's also multicultural passion and a direct conflict with each other. Has that affected your... I think a lot. And for two, for two instance, when I would often, I still go around to schools, but I went to a lot more schools and once I was in California. And I was at this school and I had just written, well, I had made the... For this book, I had made just the rough draft and a few pictures. Now, this book is about Ibn Battuta, who was a Moroccan, who traveled all over the world many centuries ago. And I love maps. I love Arabic calligraphy. And so I put all of that in this book. And so some of these pictures were finished and I was showing this to this class in fourth grade class in Southern California. And afterwards, these two girls came up to me and they said, Mr. Umfrey, can you read that writing? And I said, yes. I said, can you? And they said, yes. I said, where are you from? And they said, Afghanistan. And I started to speak to them in Afghan Persian. One of the girls burst into tears. And the other one, and the kids were all wondering, what had I had said? And so the one Afghan girl was told of fib and said, oh, he told a joke and she's really laughing. Afterwards, the girls told me that this was the first time that anybody had ever acknowledged them as coming from another place. And several months later, when this book was finished, and it was going to be published, and the publishing date was September 12th, 2001. So now it's September 8th or something, 2001. And I'm at a school here. And I'm showing them this book. And this girl raises her hand and I said, yes. And she says, can you read that writing? I said, yeah. And I said, can you? And she says, yes. I said, where are you from? Yemen. And I said, what's your name? She said, Mona. And I wrote it on the board or tried to. Mona's very hard to write in Arabic script. You'd think it's easy, but it's not. So I had her come up and I said, well, you'll have to show me. Afterwards, I heard from the teacher that all of the children, she wrote the names of all the children in her class in Arabic and they all were thrilled to have that. I only hope that something like this book, I only hope that when September 11th happened a couple of days later, that those kids thought about that moment, that they thought about what it meant to share something with somebody from another culture. And I have to say the same thing, too, about this book, this silent music, which came out in 2003. I know, 2006 or 2007, I don't remember. But I wrote it because of the Iraq war. And I wanted to write about calligraphy and I wanted to write about a little boy in Iraq. And I knew the book would never get published, but somehow it did by McMillan. It was the same thing. It was to validate a culture that was going to be vilified and I knew it was going to be vilified. The political institutions of that culture are all the other things. You can have them as enemies and you can vilify them, but the culture itself, that's off limits as far as I'm concerned. It's something else. But you've had other adventures in foreign languages, you did Beowulf. Beowulf, yes, yes, Beowulf. And I would like to show you it, that it's green and it won't show on this board. But yeah, I had never read Beowulf. And a friend of mine said, I think you ought to do Beowulf as your next children's books. And of course, my excuse was I'd never read it. So she gave me Seamus Haney's translation. Well, his translation is really very nice. And afterwards I said, well, yeah, I'd like to do this. I'd like to write something about my culture, since a lot of my ancestors came from Northern Europe. And I then another friend said, well, why don't you write it using only Anglo-Saxon words? We have about 80% of our vocabulary is Latin or French. Only 20% is Germanic or Anglo-Saxon. But that 20% we use 80% of the time. So I rewrote the whole poem in English, using only words that could be traced back to Anglo-Saxon. And it was it took years. Because I had to look up a lot of words in the book, I thought, Oh, a word like big, surely that's Anglo-Saxon. No, it's not. It happens to be Norse or something. And it was a lot of fun to do. I've only had experience of that kind of book once before. There was a famous architectural historian Yale, who wrote a book about Greek architecture and using only Greek, rooted words. Now that would be hard. That would be almost imperitable for most people. Well, the opposite happened with Dale Wolf, because Anglo-Saxon words are so earthy and so common that it's like all that the meaning comes right into your right end of your head. Whereas I can only imagine the other would be difficult. A lot of these books, too, I I once I get into it, I decide that I'm going to write little notes in the book. So that maybe some kid some day might figure that out. So I write it in a different language or I'm hoping like, for example, this one was my first book. This is the story I told that librarian about a Chinese grandfather and his grandson and how they make clouds. And they don't really make clouds. They make paper. But oh, there are pages in here that I like Chinese, too. And I like Chinese calligraphy. And there's Arabic, too. So I wrote different things on different things about me or about whatever it is. I wanted some kind of, it's kind of notes in the bottle that maybe somebody might pick up. And this one, no one ever figured out that this is about the man who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs. Champagne. I was always fascinated by him. Let's let's return to this. We have to take a break. Right. Thank you. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Aloha, I'm Kay Lee Akina, and I volunteer at Think Tech Hawaii as a host of the program Hawaii Together. Why? Because Think Tech Hawaii is doing a very important job in making sure that there is a conversation ongoing between people of all backgrounds and all views. That's what civil discourse is all about. And Think Tech is an important part of finding solutions for a better Hawaii. For the first time, Think Tech Hawaii is participating in an online web based fundraising campaign to raise $40,000. It's called Give Thanks to Think Tech, and it will run only during the month of November. And you can help. Please donate what you can so that Think Tech Hawaii can continue to raise public awareness and promote civic engagement through free programming like mine. Please send your tax deductible contribution by going to this website on the screen, www.thanksforthinktech.cozvox.com. On behalf of the community enriched by Think Tech Hawaii's 30 plus weekly shows, thank you. Mahalo for your generosity. Back again. You were telling us about the secret of knowledge. I just wanted to mention that along with a lot of these books, I've written little messages to kids. I have no idea when they will be able to read these messages. Maybe they will have to be adults. Maybe the book will be on a shelf and they'll pick it up and they will be an Egyptologist. And they'll open this book. And maybe they were on an Egyptologist because maybe I influenced them somehow. Wouldn't that be great? But I'm not claiming that, you know, any of that's going to happen. But I wrote the whole story in Egyptian on these pages. No, is that real? Yes. So that's amazing. No, I decided I decided that why not. And a couple of other places in here. Do you learn this? I bear that with a dictionary. There's a dictionary. There's a grammar books. There are others that have cut, you know, books speak Egyptian. Nobody knows how to pronounce it. No, the Egyptians, as clever as they were, were so clever that they figured out that if you don't write the vowels, you can write a lot more words faster. That's true. A lot of Middle Eastern languages. That's right. Arabic, Hebrew work like that. So does this. So nobody knows how to pronounce it. And there is Coptic, which is still alive. You can go live only in the church, you can go to the Coptic Church and hear them. There's a Coptic Church here. And say the gospel in Coptic. But saying you left messages for people. Did you mean that? Yes, like, for example, in a couple of these pages, since this book was made by James Rumpford in the year 2000, and I finished this picture. This one, in particular about Gutenberg, there are messages all over, but when the pictures got reduced, I can't read them anymore. And I don't, I think the kid would have to have a real magnifying. I think this says in Latin, I have finished writing this on this day, 13th day of October, you know, 2000, something or other and there are several in here like that. So were you the kind of kid who wrote messages and textbooks? No, I wasn't. But I have been writing messages and books and a few odd books. You know, why not? You know, that's a whole study, this Scolia thing, you know, of also a publisher. Right. So I want to get into Gutenberg in a bit, but just tell us about your publishing adventures here in Manoa Publishing. Well, I am Manoa Press. I began that in 1986. And I made handmade books. I set the type of made the paper, I bound the books. And then paper as well. Yes, I made the paper as well. And I enjoyed doing that. And then when my first children's books came out, I abandoned all that because I had no more time. And then later, so many things have changed. And the computer has made everything so different that you can create books on the computer. And now in Google and other companies, you can have these books published in some cases free. And it's print on demand. And so I've done a lot of that. And it's a I'm not a very good promoter. So some of these books like those, the yellow one and this one. I like this book, it's about an African King. But I can't find a publisher for it. So I published it myself. And I did the pictures and all of that. And Manoa Press and this is what you get when it comes back from this print on demand. So I've done quite a few books like that. And I make maybe $10-12 a month. So it's just super. But I don't care. I like making books. I like drawing pictures. And I like putting a lot of that together. And so this is a way for me to do that when I am not doing more serious things with a contract where you have the specifics of a particular job, and you have to get it done. These are more for fun. Here isn't this one. And this one, I decided that for this Gutenberg book, I would publish myself a companion guide. This Gutenberg book is very simple. It's all about how to make a book in the 15th century. What got you into that? I like making books myself. And so one day I sat down and I wrote a riddle, you know, and I decided the riddle is this. In the city of Mainz in Germany around the year 1450, there appeared a mysterious thing. It was made of rags and bones, soot and seeds. It wore a dark brown coat and was filled with gold. It took lead and tin, tin, strong oak, and a mountain to make it. What was it? I have the least idea. Well, when you read a book, I tell you what it is. So rags make paper. The bones make the glue in the paper. The dark brown coat is a leather. And the gold inside that they would paint with gold, lead and tin is the type that they used to use. And strong oak is the press. And the mountain that made it, it's Gutenberg. Because in German, it means good mountain. So you really started with the riddle? I wrote the riddle and that's it. And I wrote this and probably sat down in a few minutes and wrote the whole thing. And darned if one of my editors didn't like it, because I had not one idea how I was going to illustrate it. And so it took me years to illustrate this book. And when I finished, I realized I had put so many things in these pictures. They are so complicated because they are like late middle a pictures of late manuscripts of late middle ages, with thousands of little things going on in each picture. I realized that all that needed to be explained. So I published this my own book about the explanation. What does it mean to have a big letter in the beginning? And how is that done? How do you set type? And what is it? How do you correct it? And all of that. The biggest thing I found in here, the Gutenberg Bible, which you can look at online. And there are several different copies from different places. I didn't realize it was riddled with typographical errors. I was so shocked. So the first Bible has so many errors in it that he had to do it again. And he had to smush the lines because he didn't want to wreck the next page. And then he made mistakes on the corrections. I was absolutely shocked. I can remember years ago when you were going in the production process, if you had a widow or an orphan, a short line at the bottom of the top of the page, you had to edit the page in such a way that you did not alter the page before and after. I still do that. I'm in the process of writing this more of an adult book thing with my brother. And I'm looking through the whole thing for the widows and the orphans. And my brother is like, why are you doing that? Who cares? You and I would care. All right. Well, you do care in a printed book because it just looks like a mistake. Right. It does. But a lot of people aren't on the ebook, you know, it wouldn't know. Oh, yeah. Well, that's the trouble. The ebook just totally throws typography and the whole thing out the window. But you're not totally retrograde. You fell in love with a website. You have a very beautiful, very elaborate website. Thank you. Tell us about it. Well, I figured that. Right. James from James from isn't it James Rumpfer.com? Yes, James from James Rumpfer.com is really worth a look. I didn't know really what I should put on a website. So I looked at a few and then I started adding stuff to mine. I learned how to do a website. And pretty soon I had more in it than anybody would ever care to look at. But it's all there. And I also have one from Manoa Press. And so you can there I don't keep it up as well as the one for the children's books. But as long as the technology is there, for me to be able to add and change things, it's it's a lot of fun. And the space is infinite. Yes. Yes. And I have enjoyed doing that. I can't do fancy things like move things around and and have little animations. But hey, it's okay. Well, you have you have strong thoughts about publishing. What's what's going on there with you? Oh, well, I think that publishing is in a state of flux. And I think that ever since ebooks came on the market, and the collapse of brick and mortar stores that publishing has had to change, I look at the whole thing as it must have been like in 1450, here comes along Gutenberg with the printing press, he's going to put all these scribes and copy us out of business. And the first thing that happens, then when Gutenbergs type to look exactly like what the scribes do. So with all the curly cues and all the funny things. So he does that. And they don't know how to treat this idea of publishing, because publishing was really different. Today, I look at it as the same. Instead of something like Gutenberg, its ebooks came along, and the whole internet, and that has changed things, I think so dramatically that I don't think publishers know what they're doing. I don't know if they know how they're going to make enough money to to control things and make a business out of it. And I think we all have to stay tuned because it's going, there's going to be changes, these things are going to work themselves out. In another 10, 15 years, we're going to look at something totally different, I think. In fact, in this book, at the end of this book on Gutenberg, I said to the kid, I said to the reader, you know, this is how books were made in the 15th century. But when you get to be 50, 60 years old, they're going to be different. So maybe you'll write a new book about how things used to be made in the early 21st century. Because I think that's how fast things are going to start changing. One interesting consequence of this publishing revolution, I run the Hawaii Book and Music Festival. And I'm astonished that book festivals are flourishing around the world. Ours is expanded considerably. But they're everywhere now. Every major city around the world has a book festival because people are really hungry to hear those voices. And to me, the voice is the key. And when I look at this array of 25 books, if they were all in a shop window, I would say that every one of those is a rumford book. I don't know how you know it, but there's just something about it that speaks to one. You know, I think that's the nice thing about the era we're living in, that people do have a channel, a means to get their voice heard. And some of it's print on demand. Some of it is going to be blogs and other things like that. But people who are educated and have something to say, there are people who want to listen. And I think you found that in the Book and Music Festival here. And just as you say, they're occurring all throughout the world, which is a wonderful thing. The only problem with such a the volume of books that are being self published and published is how do you find the one that's right for you? If there is such a thing, you can't browse in a bookstore and you don't have that impulse anymore. I don't know how that's done. In fact, I think that is putting a lot of pressure on authors and illustrators, because now they want you to not only write the book or illustrate it, they want you to have an immense web presence before they even want to look at you because they realize that that's what's going to count. And that's, that's, that's a big burden. If you self publish on create space on Amazon, the result looks like every other book. I mean, in other words, you have all the bells and whistles. But how does anyone go to that page is some mystery. I don't know. And in fact, I do not know. And that's why, you know, there are some of those books I've put on create space that are being sold on Amazon. I only sold one copy for one because I don't, I don't have enough time in my life to go around and advertise. For some odd reason, some Korean publisher saw this, wrote me and asked for the rights to publish this in Korean, and they translated the whole thing. And I was absolutely amazed. How did they hear about me? How did that all come about? Well, there's something magical about that, Senator and deputy. Yes. And that's what a book is. My first editor said, you know, well, now the book's done. So we'll just let it sell. Well, when you're a new author, that's the worst thing you want to hear. You want to mean you're not going to, you don't have a destination for it. You know, it's not going to go here and it's not going to go there. You're going to just let it go. Well, the wisdom of that is taken. It's taken me 20 years to understand the wisdom of that. Well, look at this table. I mean, it's just the most astonishing array you've achieved in relatively short time. Thank you very much. Thank you. It was a great pleasure. Thank you.