• Home
  • Services
    • Wordsmith Services
    • Client Success Stories
  • Publications
    • Wordsmith Publications
    • Publication Process
      • Independent Publication Process
      • Publication Planning Questions
    • Publication Tips & Techniques
      • Photoshop Tips
        • Create Pencil Art from Color Photo
      • Website Development
        • Useful HTML
        • HTML Editor
    • Independent Book Reviewers
    • HOPE U-46 Report
  • Legacy Documents
    • Legacy Documents (in General)
    • Legacy Letters
      • Overview of Legacy Letters
      • Wordsmith Legacy Letter Package
      • Legacy Letters Reading List
  • Word Fun
    • Collective Nouns
    • Disappearing Vowels
    • Words Most Missed
    • Funky Font Art
    • Good Word Places
      • LinkedIn Word Groups
      • Goodreads
  • About Us
    • About Us
    • Staffing
      • Staffing Model
      • Rod Mebane, Managing Editor
      • Donna Mebane, Author & Senior Associate
      • Angela Scaperlanda Buján, Senior Associate
  • Contact Us

Posthumous 1st-Grade Book on ‘Shapes’ Honors Fallen Teen


At the viewing in the funeral home for Emma, a radiant young woman who died in her sleep at the age of 19 in July 2011, her family put out a number of things that visitors could look at while they waited in line to pay their respects. One of those items was a “book” that Emma wrote in first grade. It was called A Book Abot Chaps (phonetic for “A Book About Shapes).” It was hand-colored on lined notebook paper, and it looked every bit the product of a first grader, with many endearing, age-related mistakes. When people picked up and read the crumpled, stapled masterpiece, they laughed at Emma’s goofs in spelling and presentation as she displayed her version of the carkol, the dimind, and the scwar.

A Book Abot Chaps
by Emma Mebane

Seeing this warm reaction, the family decided to publish Emma’s A Book Abot Chaps as a tribute to her life. They felt that Emma becoming a published Amazon author would be an honor to her, and Wordsmith Associates agreed to help the family realize that goal.

The work to ready Emma’s information for publication involved more than one might imagine, in that there were numerous elements that needed to be scanned and cleaned up. Once that was complete, a colorful soft-bound booklet was created, and Emma officially became an Amazon Published Author on September 1, 2011, less than 2 months after her death.

As suggested, the numerous things that are “wrong” in A Book Abot Chaps are exactly the things that make it so right. From the perspective of someone older, the book elegantly depicts the wonder of a child learning something for the first time (albeit with mixed success). From the perspective of a first grader, A Book Abot Chaps makes perfect sense exactly as it is. For you, regardless of perspective, A Book Abot Chaps will bring a smile to your face. (Bonus: The verso pages of the booklet provide spaces for readers to use coloring to express their own chaps-related ideas.)

As an historical footnote, at the time of Emma’s death, she worked as a server at an establishment called Town House Books & Café, and was a beloved member of the “Townhouse Family.” Around the first anniversary of Emma’s death, the Town House owners created a Chaps Garden as a tribute to Emma. All of her chaps, including her renowned triangl (which looks remarkably like a rectangle), are created as brick borders in the garden to outline growing spots for a variety of items, including Lady Emma roses. Check out the Emma Mebane Chaps Garden in front of 105 N. Second Avenue in St. Charles, Illinois.

CLICK HERE to review a netbook version of A Book Abot Chaps.

Availability

Paperback – ISBN 978-0-615-52092-6 – 5.5″ wide x 8.5″ tall – 20 pages – List Price $4.95

Individual copies of A Book Abot Chaps are available from Amazon and other online & independent booksellers.

See Other Wordsmith Publications

SEEK TO FIND

WRITINGS ON THE WALL

  • Word is a shadow of deed. –Democritus
  • Sweet religion makes a rhapsody of words. –Shakespeare, Hamlet
  • It is not of so much consequence what you say, as how you say it. Memorable sentences are memorable on account of some irradiating word. –Alexander Smith, “Dreamthorp,” On the Writing of Essays
  • The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it. –Ernest Hemingway, Paris Review
  • In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature. –Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous
  • Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact. It is silence which isolates. –Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
  • The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls and whispered in the sounds of silence. –Paul Simon, The Sound of Silence
  • All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind. –Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
  • Choice word and measured phrase… above the reach of ordinary men. –William Wordsworth, Resolution and Independence
  • And many a word, at random spoken, may soothe a wound or heart that’s broken. –Sir Walter Scott, Lord of the Isles
  • Omit needless words. –William Strunk, Jr, The Elements of Style
  • Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it. –Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
  • My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts –never to heaven go. –Shakespeare, Hamlet
  • Life's like a movie. Write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending. –Jim Henson, The Muppet Movie
  • To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and the same reality. –Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Traité Elémentaire de Chimie
  • I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long Words Bother me. –Alan Alexander Milne, Willie-the-Pooh
  • Honeyed words like bees, gilded and sticky, with a little sting. –Elinor Hoyt Wylie, Pretty Words
  • In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. –The Common Gospel, “Eternal Word”
  • Prête-moi ta plume pour écrire un mot. Lend me your pen to write a word. –Au Clair de la Lune
  • Man’s word is God in man. –Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Idylls of the King,” The Coming of Arthur
  • The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work and that writing didn’t require any. –Russell Baker, Growing Up
  • So is a word better than a gift. –Apocrypha
  • Good words are worth much … and cost little. –George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum
  • How long a time lies in one little word! Such is the breath of kings. –Shakespeare, King Richard II
  • Light dies before thy uncreating word; Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall, and universal darkness buries all. –Alexander Pope, The Dunciad
  • Words are like leaves and, where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. –Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism
  • Watch your thoughts, they become your words. Watch your words, they become your action. Watch your actions, they become your habits. Watch your habits, they become your character. Watch your character, it becomes your destiny. –Anonymous
  • “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” –Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
  • A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator. –John Steinbeck, “In Awe of Words”
  • Nature fits all her children with something to do, He who would write and can’t write, can surely review. –James Russell Lowell, A Fable for Critics
  • How many verses have I thrown into the fire because the one peculiar word, the wanted most, was irrecoverably lost. –Walter Savage Landor, Verses Why Burnt
  • Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled. –Horace, Epistles
  • The writer doesn’t want success ... The writer wants to leave a scratch on the wall of oblivion that someone a hundred or a thousand years later will see. Kilroy was here. –William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University

CLICK HERE to see these writings on the wall in a larger size.

Printing in Perspective

Printing in Perspective
Your life is made up of two dates and a dash. Make the most of the dash.

Make the most of your life - your dash! - and share what you learn with others.

The kingdom of God does not come with observation ... for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. -Jesus the Messiah. The Common Gospel ("Final Journey)

LEARN ABOUT ‘LEGACY DOCUMENTS’

LEARN ABOUT ‘LEGACY DOCUMENTS’

WORDS-OF-THE-DAY

AN AFFILIATED SERVICE

AN AFFILIATED SERVICE

Copyright © 2021 · Wordsmith.Associates · Log in