WEBSTER GROVES, Mo. — New York Times bestselling author Adam Rubin is returning to St. Louis to meet with and inspire young fans.
Rubin will be signing books at The Novel Neighbor on Big Bend Boulevard on Monday, Feb. 21. The event starts at 3:30 p.m., but you do have to RSVP on the store’s website and purchase at least one of Rubin’s books for the signing portion. There is a limit of three items per person in order to make sure everyone gets through the line.
Picking three is a tough choice, since Rubin has several picture book titles to his name, including "Gladys the Magic Chicken," "Robotsauce," "Those Darn Squirrels," "Secret Pizza Party," and most notably, "Dragons Love Tacos" and "Dragons Love Tacos 2".
Now, Rubin is branching out into the middle school genre with a short story collection called "The Ice Cream Machine".
“The concept of 'The Ice Cream Machine' is that it's six totally different stories with the exact same name,” Rubin said.
That brought his word count up to 60,000 and increased the pressure.
“Writing a picture book feels like a song,” Rubin said. “You can completely change it, you can start from scratch, you can work on every little tiny detail until it feels perfect. With a book the size of the ice cream machine, it felt like trying to climb a mountain. Like there was this insurmountable task ahead of me.”
Rubin graduated from Washington University of St. Louis and credits connections made in college for his current success.
“If it wasn't for WashU, I wouldn't be writing picture books at all,” Rubin said.
He got his foot in the door thanks to a college friend. Since then, he’s worked with WashU grad and illustrator Daniel Salmieri on several projects, including "The Ice Cream Machine."
This new book also features a cover design from WashU Professor of Art John Hendrix. While Hendrix started teaching at Washington University after Rubin graduated, he says he heard about Rubin before they got the chance to meet.
“I'd known Adam's work for many, many years,” Hendrix said. “Loved his writing. Knew he was a WashU student. Probably about 10 years ago, he came to visit some students. We got to hang out. You know, it was a mutual admiration society. We just hit it off and have stayed in touch since.”
On top of being the chair of WashU’s Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts’ MFA in Illustration and Visual Culture program, Hendrix is a published author and illustrator himself with several titles under his belt.
Hendrix says he loves designing book covers but doing "The Ice Cream Machine" posed a challenge: uniting six separate and unique stories under one cover, without giving anything away. He developed the font for the title and sent sketches with the publisher’s art director. He added ink to the sketches, then paint, then scanned them into a computer and made some tweaks digitally before settling on a final product.
In honor of their ties to WashU, he included a little doodle of Brookings Hall on the cover as a St. Louis Easter egg.
But that’s not the only reason to check out the cover art of "The Ice Cream Machine". When you take off the dust jacket, it can transform into an envelope.
That idea was all Rubin’s.
“The publisher advised me very strongly that we needed to have a dust jacket, and so I tried to think of a way to make it surprising or more interesting than just the average dust jacket,” Rubin said.
The reason for the envelope goes along with the inspiration for the project. Rubin says the number one question he gets on book tours is ‘where do book ideas come from?” so he wrote six different stories with the same name to show readers that anything is possible when you write.
“The trick is allowing yourself to believe that your ideas are good ideas,” Rubin said. “My hope is that that will encourage them to give creative writing and try.”
That’s where the envelope comes into play. Rubin invites kids to write their own stories and mail them to him. He will go through submissions received by the end of the school year, and plans to publish some in the paperback edition of "The Ice Cream Machine."
“We'll see how many kids actually do it,” Hendrix said. “I hope he gets some good stories sent in.”
This isn’t the end of the collaboration between Rubin and Hendrix. Rubin says he wrote a sequel to "The Ice Cream Machine" using the same format of six stories that share a title. However, he’s not ready to share that title yet, and Hendrix was vague on his involvement in the next project.
“I’m glad he told you that,” Hendrix said. “I wasn’t gonna say that. I’m glad he said it so I’m not the person who said it. Yes, hopefully a sequel is coming soon.”