The theme of this year’s Ithaca (New York) Kids’ Book Fest was “Love Those Letters,” and Tad Hills’s How Rocket Learned to Read, the story of Rocket the dog and his encounter with “the wondrous, mighty, gorgeous alphabet,” offered the perfect vehicle for the festival’s alphabet-related activities. A copy of the book was given to every pre-K, kindergarten and first grade child in the Ithaca school district.
Ithaca’s Family Reading Partnership sponsors the festival, which took place last Saturday, and its head, Brigid Hubberman, had to search for a book to go with the alphabet theme. She hadn’t previously known about Hills’s book—she saw it on a store shelf while shopping for something else. “I almost started jumping up and down right there in the store,” she confessed. Wegman’s, the Rochester-based food store chain, sponsored the 4000-copy purchase.
The Family Reading Partnership has been distributing books to Ithaca’s children for over a decade now. “Ownership of books means so much to kids,” Hubberman said, “especially in families that don’t have very many. I was walking down the hall in a school carrying a copy of My Father’s Dragon, which we distributed a couple of years ago, and a young student saw it and lit up. ‘I have that book,’ she told me proudly, ‘and every night I read it over and over and over again.’ ”
At the festival, held at Boynton Middle School, Tad Hills sat signing books next to his dog, the real Rocket, who submitted good-naturedly to hours of petting while his owner talked to young festival visitors. Later, the two took a break to watch a dramatized version of the book on the school’s stage.
They weren’t the festival’s only attraction. Alphabet “passports” were issued to each visitor with a letter missing on each page; these were to be stamped at six stations throughout the festival. (“D” was for “dog,” a room with six or seven docile hounds and books to read to them; reluctant readers are eager to read to dogs, it’s been found.) There were Shakespearean costumes to try on and typewriters to experiment with (“What’s that, Dad?”), and, of course, a roomful of books to purchase. Based on the previous year’s figures, organizers expected about 2000 attendees, but the clicker at the admissions desk broke around the 2400 mark, and the passports ran out just after lunch. “It’s fantastic, isn’t it?” said Hubberman, surveying the hubbub. “Now we’re thinking about the holidays. We’re thinking about how neat it would be if every kid woke up to a gift-wrapped book at the bottom of their bed.”
