American Fork Library
We are thrilled to announce our latest book, All Together Now at the American Fork Library. This is a custom book commissioned by the American Fork Library here in Utah. Casandria Crane, the library director, was looking for a unique and impressive reward for the library’s summer reading program that would tie in directly with the library’s values and goals of literacy, life-long love of reading, and building community.
Earlier this year, Mike met Casandria, and gave her a copy of our coloring + activity books after collaborating with her on another project (the library book bike, which is amazing, BTW!) Within a week, Casandria emailed the team to tell us that she and the Friends of the American Fork Library LOVED our books, and in fact they HAD to have one all about their library!
Casandria got us started with great resources about American Fork city’s history and the library’s history as well as their current programs and services. During on-site visits to the library, we got a great sense of the vibe and personality of the library and the people who work there. These visits fueled our creativity to really bring the library to life on the pages of this activity book!
We love anything weird, funny, and quirky, so as we met with Casandria, we asked, “What is really unique and surprising or unexpected about your library that is going to be fun to include… for example… are there any ghost stories?” To our surprise and delight, Casandria said that YES, IN FACT there were stories about a ghost in the basement! The library’s ghost made it into a fill-in-the-bubble comic, which is one of our most-requested types of activities:
As Casandria was sharing with us some of the unique history of the library, she described a BOOK BRIGADE, where American Fork citizens worked together to form a human chain from a storage facility to the new library. Books were passed from person to person to move the collection from storage into the new building! After she described this, Mike commented, “That’s really cool, because I’d be curious what kind of vehicles they even would have had access to back then!” After Casandria paused for a couple beats, she clarified, “This was in the year 2000.” Mike, Holly and I (Alma) ALL burst out laughing, because we had all been imagining something 100 years ago, not 23 years ago.
It was important to Casandria that this book be accessible to all ages. This isn’t hard for us to do, because first and foremost we always make sure that every page and every activity in our books is a page that WE would want to read and an activity that WE would like to do. A great example of this is our flowchart, which helps you decide what genre of book you should read next:
When we submitted a draft about 2/3rds of the way through development to Casandria, she showed our progress to the Friends of the American Fork Library (the volunteer organization that coordinates fund raising and grant applications to support the library), and they literally APPLAUDED and asked Casandria, “Is it 100 times better than you thought it would be?!” We were thrilled to deliver an activity book that far exceeded expectations!