THEME RELATED STUFF

Parts Of A Book Quiz

Sam Houston Area Council

Have the boys use the following words to guess the answers to the questions below:

Cover                                Illustrator                              Author

Publisher                           Title Page                                   Title

Call Number                        Spine

1.     I hold the book together. I also tell you the book's title, author, publisher and call number. Who am I?
                                                                                    [Spine]

2.     I am the person who wrote the book. Who am I?
                                                                                 [Author]

3.     I am the first page of the book. I tell you the name of the book, the author and the illustrator. I also tell you who published the book. Who am I?                                                        [Title Page]

4.     I am the name of the book. Who am I?               [Title]

5.     I am the person who drew the pictures for the book. Who am I?      [Illustrator]

6.     I am the company that makes the book. Who am I?         [Publisher]

7.     I protect the pages in the book. I also tell you the title of the book. Who am I?            [Cover]

8.     I tell you where you will find the book in the library. Who am I?      [Call Number]

Fun Facts about Cinderella

Alice, Golden Empire Council

Cinderella, the tale with the beautiful, kind and over-worked girl who had three evil stepsisters, was written by Charles Perrault.  He was a Frenchman who collected folk tales in the late 1600’s.

The Chinese have their own version of Cinderella – the girl is called Yeh-hsien.  That story dates from 850 AD.

The Greeks also had a version, recorded by a Roman historian in the first century BC.  Cinderella was a Greek slave girl called Rhodopis, meaning “rosy-cheeked.”

Have your Cub Scouts ask the Children’s Librarian about other folk tales that have been told in various countries and cultures.  Not a folk tale but the story of the Great Flood and Noah's Ark appear in almost all cultures around the world. 

A Timeline of Book Facts:

Alice, Golden Empire Council

Prehistoric – pictures were carved on the walls of caves, on rock and bone.  Eventually, people also used waxed boards, animal skins and clay tablets, which were more portable.

4000 BC – ancient Egyptians invited the first paper-like material made from papyrus plants that grew along the Nile.  They wove the reeds into sheets and then pounded them into thin sheets.  The word “paper” came from this plant.

105 AD – Arab traders in Asia set up paper mills in Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, using rags that were ground into a lumpy pulp, then made into thin sheets coated with starch paste.

800-900 – The Vikings made a metal tool for use in “writing” on wax tablets.  They even made “erasers” by making a rounded end on the stylus!

1000 – The Chinese were already using blocks of pear or jujube wood to carve out a whole page of text at a time that was then printed onto paper.  Folded pages are sewn together in Europe by women using a “kettle” stitch to reinforce the binding.

1200 – Italy became a major paper producer, and developed water powered mills.  They used flax and cotton fibers from old clothes.  Only royalty, scholars and monks could read, and books were handwritten, mostly by Monks, so they were expensive and scarce.

1400 – Scribes could buy rolls or sheets of parchment to write on from shops.  Parchment was made from animal skin soaked in a lime solution for up to 10 days, then scraped and soaked again.  It was then stretched on a wooden frame, scraped with a curved knife, allowed to dry, then scraped a final time to make it as smooth as possible.

1453 – Johann Gutenberg invented moveable type, which allowed books to be printed much more quickly and cheaply. The demand for books and paper increased as the average person began to learn to read and have access to books.

1600 – Illustrations for books were carved into wood to create blocks, from which the pictures could be printed – they were known as woodcuts.

1620 – Children in the Pilgrim colonies used a “hornbook” to learn their alphabet and school lessons.

1719 – A French scientist, Rene de Reaumur saw wasps using tiny slivers of wood to make their papery nests, which led to using wood to make useable paper.

1770-1790 – American soldiers during the Revolutionary War had to tear up old books to use for wadding for their guns, since there was not enough paper to meet demand.  Paper was still produced by hand using screens pulled up through pulp.

1798 – Frenchman Louis Robert, a clerk at a paper mill, invented a machine that was hand cranked and produced paper on a continuous screen.  Two Englishmen, the Fourdrinier brothers, improved on his design and sold their machine, which squeezed out excess water.

1800 – Illustrations for books were printed from engravings made on steel plates, and printed on different sheets of paper than the text.  New technology made color printing possible, so that color didn’t have to be added by hand.

1810 – Moveable books first began to appear.  Pop-up books and books with pictures that move and change, using strings to hold the moving parts together, became very popular.

1820 – Books on wheels began to appear, making it possible for working people to get books from a horse-drawn wagon even if they lived far from town.

In Turkey, the library was sometimes carried on a donkey!  Of course, today, we have mobile libraries in large buses, such as the Gates Foundation Techmobile, which even has internet and other technology on board!  See a poster about books on wheels at www.ifla.org/VII/s38/news/mobpos.htm

1850-1870 – Straw, sugar cane waste and tree bark were all tried as an alternative to using cloth rags to make paper.  Friedrich Gottlob Keller, a German, invented a machine that turned wood into pulp, but made only a poor quality paper.  Englishman Hugh Burgess improved the process by adding a chemical solution to “digest” the wood pulp, and an English chemist found a better solution that incuded sulfate.

1862 – Lewis Carroll, a young Oxford University professor, told the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to some children on a river trip.  Later, he wrote it out neatly as a present for one of them, a girl named Alice Liddell.  Although his drawings were very good, he asked cartoonist John Tenniel to illustrate the book that was published in 1865. Today, the story has been translated into almost every language, even Esperanto!  In the Swahili version in Africa, Alice is called Elisi.

1873 – The first commercially produced typewriter was sold by the Remington Company.  The typewriter became the choice of many authors of books, since it was quicker and easier than handwriting a book.

1870-1880 – American paper mills in New York and New England used native Spruce trees with sulfate to make a good quality paper.

1900’s  - The first free public libraries opened in most countries, replacing the European libraries that people had to pay to use. In some Medieval libraries, the books were even chained to a rod along the bookcase. In the United States, many libraries are known as the Carnegie Library, after the wealthy man who donated the money to build libraries in many towns and cities.

1889-1900 – Newspapers and magazines took advantage of plentiful mass-produced and low cost paper in the United States. Paper even replaced slates in the school room. Paper production also expanded to the upper Midwest, using spruce and balsam wood, and to the West Coast, where hemlock, fir and pin were used.  In the South, pine was used.

1900 – 2000 – Recycled paper began to be used, and by 2000, 45% of the paper in the United States was recovered and reused.  Huge grindstones added a mechanical process to the chemical breakdown of wood pulp into paper.

2003 – The percentage of recycled paper rose to 50% and more, and modern technology resulted in brighter paper that is lighter in weight.  Alternative fibers, new products and the use of sustainable resources combined with new technology to work towards the goal of recovering 55% of paper products by 2012.