Manoa's 'Traveling Man' visits Washington, D.C.

By Jolie Jean Cotton
Special to The Advertiser

After several years of producing some of the most provocative picture books on the national market, Manoa author/illustrator James Rumford is finally beginning to receive the recognition he deserves.

For 2001, Rumford's "Traveling Man: The Journey of Ibn Battuta 1325-1354" made some prestigious lists. The American Library Association named "Traveling Man" a Notable Book. School Library Journal picked it as one of the Best Books of the Year. The New York Public Library listed the book among their One Hundred Books for Reading and Sharing and the Smithsonian included the title in their Notable Book list.

Last month Rumford was invited to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art. On Oct. 19, he read "Traveling Man" to a full house and talked about Ibn Battuta's travels.

"The children made their own travel journals of places they had visited or of how they came that day from their house to the museum," Rumford said. "The kids loved showing me their journals."

"Before we left that afternoon, I stood outside and had my picture taken standing in front of the sign on the mall announcing my reading and talk," Rumford said. "A silly thing, the sign was small, but it was fun."

During last month's trip to Washington, D.C., Rumford visited area schools and bookstores to promote his newest book, "There's A Monster in the Alphabet."

Rumford's fifth book with Houghton-Mifflin is quite different from the other books he has written and illustrated.

"In this book, I have done what I would call 'original research,' " Rumford said. "That means that if I had written this for an adult publication, then I would be presenting new information."

"The information in this book you cannot get elsewhere, because my idea about the relationship between the myth of Cadmus and the order of the alphabet is my idea, based on all this reading that I've done."

The number of books for children that are presented as fact but are brimming with errors shocks Rumford.

He felt no hesitation in filling his newest book with unanswered questions.

In the end notes of "There's a Monster in the Alphabet" you will read:

"The Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of many alphabets. Below are its most famous offspring: English in black, Greek in purple, Hebrew in orange and Arabic in turquoise. The earliest forms of the letters are in gray and go back before the Phoenician alphabet, to Egypt itself.

The link between these forms and Phoenician ones is not certain, and here and there you will see question marks. Don't worry. This just means that there is a lot more for you to discover."

"The very notion that there's a pictographic basis for our letters has been debated for years," Rumford said.

"My hope is to get kids interested in one of the true wonders of the Ancient world, our alphabet," Rumford said. "It's something you use every day and you just don't think about it. It's the same kind of feeling I think you might have if you go outside and somebody starts to tell you about the constellations. Then every time you go out there you see it differently. And every time you use the alphabet, I want you to see it differently."