After my first coloring book for adults, Wise Words from Shakespeare (thread: Coloring Book for Adults: "Wise Words from Shakespeare" - Marketplace - Straight Dope Message Board ), I started work on a second, Wise Words from Jane Austen. That one is forthcoming, but I put it aside about three quarters of the way through because I wasn’t entirely happy with my choices for some of the illustrations/quotations, and wanted to think about it further before proceeding.
In the meantime, I had received several suggestions for new volumes in the series. One of them–to make a book of quotations from famous left-handed people–really stuck in my mind, given that my mother is left-handed. She had made it clear that the world is set up for the convenience of the majority–isn’t that always the way? So I took those suggestions (one of which appeared in the thread linked above) and decided to pursue the idea.
Of course I found hundreds of famous left-handed people and many potential “Wise Words” to illustrate. The research process included, first, making sure that the famous person really was left-handed (there’s a lot of guesswork when it comes to people alive centuries ago), and second, making sure that the famous person had actually said or written the quotation in question.
Unsourced quotations are all over the Internet. Most of the sites that come up when any remark is searched will be the sites that let anybody post anything; the result is that famous people throughout history are routinely credited with having said things they never did. From “let them eat cake” to “blood, sweat, and tears” to “if you have to ask how much they cost, you can’t afford one”—the people who are claimed to have said these things, never did.
So I do hope that the sourcing-research I did for the twenty-one famous left-handed people in the book will prove to have been thorough. (But I count on the SDMB members to let me know if I’ve made an error!)
Those who picked up Wise Words from Shakespeare will find this new volume to be in a similar format: twenty-one pieces of wisdom or advice, each illustrated in a full-page picture that incorporates pieces of “translated” oil paintings, etchings, and in the case of this book, photographs.
The big difference: all the ready-to-color pages in THIS book are printed on the left…equal time for the left-handed! Of course I hope and expect that right-handed people will be able to enjoy the book, too.
The CreateSpace page, currently, looks more attractive than the Amazon one–the Amazon employee who made the new page for the book, removed all the formatting from my description (so it’s kind of run-on), but perhaps they’ll fix that when they add the Look Inside feature. Since that’s not yet up, I’m posting the back cover here so that viewers can see four of the pictures. As with the first book, this one is NOT the standard kids’ coloring book made up of ‘black lines outlining white spaces,’ but instead employs some dimensional modeling and shading.
The back cover, here a bit larger so that the four example pics can be seen:
https://www.createspace.com/6512066
Here are the left-handed notables included (in this order): Albert Einstein; Judy Garland; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; Queen Victoria; President Harry S. Truman; Bill Russell; Lewis Carroll; Marie Curie; Henry Ford; Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Jimi Hendrix; Eudora Welty; James Baldwin; Marilyn Monroe; Babe Ruth; Helen Keller; Cary Grant; Mohandas Gandhi; Benjamin Franklin; Oprah Winfrey; and Charlie Chaplin.
I hope that those who are left-handed, those who might like to get a meaningful gift for a left-handed person, and–well, heck, everyone who loves inspirational quotations and coloring books in general, will give this new book a look.
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