The Power of Everyday Kindness

People who have stopped reading base their future decisions on what they used to know. If you don’t read much, you really don’t know much. You’re dangerous.

The other evening, I decided to run an errand after dinner and happened to be in the car when The Story, one of my favorite NPR programs was on.

The second guest was Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook. Although I knew about the book, I didn’t know the story behind this multi-million seller. It’s a story of passion aided by patience.

Because Jim Trelease was read to as a kid, he made a point to recreate that same thing for his own kids. Then he began volunteering in his kids’ school and noticed that the children who read the most on their own were those who were also read to by parents and teachers.

He decided to fill a gap he’d uncovered and write a book for parents about how important reading aloud is. His family gave up their summer vacation and he self-published the first edition of  The Read-Aloud Handbook in 1979.

“I self-published because I never thought any of the major publishers would be interested in it, ” he recalls. “At that point, ‘reading aloud’ was too simple and not painful enough to do the child any good.” He managed to sell 20,000 copies of his little book.

Eventually, his book was discovered by a fledgling literary agent who convinced him to expand it. Six publishers turned it down before it was picked up by Penguin. Trelease did a book tour and a respectable 50,000 copies were sold.

It wasn’t long before sales began to plunge and he thought it was over.

Then a stranger intervened. A librarian had written a letter to Dear Abby complaining about children’s lack of interest  in reading. A young mother saw the letter and wrote an unsolicited book report of The Read-Aloud Handbook and sent it to Dear Abby.

Dear Abby tracked down a copy of the book, shared the woman’s letter in her column and sales skyrocketed almost immediately to 120,000 copies. (Incidentally, Trelease continues to send this woman flowers every year on the anniversary of that column.)

He also paid for both of his kids’ college educations.

The first Penguin edition of the Handbook was followed by five more U.S. editions, along with British, Australian, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese versions.

It was the inspiration for PBS’s Storytime series, and is now the all-time bestselling guide to children’s literature for parents and teachers—nearly 2 million copies sold to date worldwide.

The Handbook is now used as a text for future teachers at more than 60 colleges and universities. In addition, the Japanese edition introduced the concept of Sustained Silent Reading  to public schools there and it became the basis for more than 3,000 elementary and secondary schools adopting SSR as a regular part of the academic day.

The book’s success also created a platform for Trelease and he became a popular speaker on the value of reading aloud to children.

Trelease’s story inspires me because it’s such a fine example of acting on an idea with no guarantee of outcome.

But what  I can’t stop thnking about is how the kindness of a stranger opened the door to success and opportunities Trelease had never imagined.

Don’t you wonder we might accomplish if we made public appreciation a regular activity?