Peter H. Reynolds always manages to walk a delicate line with his books – make that a couple lines: weighty but not weighed down. Universal yet kid-centric. No easy feat.

I was happy to share the cover for Peter’s upcoming book, The Word Collector, but first – I wanted to talk to him about it.

Travis: What’s something you collect? Or maybe used to collect?

Peter H. Reynolds: As a boy, I collected a lot of things. My collections included shells, stamps, puppets, Hardy Boy books, coins, and comic books. Now I collect paper and journals. I use those notebooks to collect my thoughts, my drawings, and yes, words.

T: Does collecting tie into creativity?

PHR: Creative people are collectors. Collectors find a passion and dive into it deeply. This exploration is fueled by curiosity and a thirst for deeper knowing. There’s a certain magic when you see a vast collection of pocket watches, for example. As you look closer, you see how each one is different. The appreciation of differences IS a sign of a creative mind. Creative people can’t help but have new ideas. It is an on-going process and we collect these idea artifacts as we go. Sometimes they are sketches, or words on scraps of paper. Collections are a reflection of a creative person’s mind. In those collections are clues to knowing the collector more fully.

Start a collection and see where it takes you.

T: What was the initial spark that led to THE WORD COLLECTOR?

PHR: I have many journals at home and in my studio. Each is a collection of doodles, drawings, poems and ideas. I have one titled: My Favorite Words. I jot words down that appeal to me. As I visited schools over the years, I would talk about the power of notebooks, sketchbooks and journals and I would mention my word collection book. I would say, “Some people collect stamps, some people collect rocks, me? I collect words.” The positive reaction I got from students and teachers inspired me to one day write a story about a boy who collects words. I finally found a slice of time to gather some of my favorite words and weave into the book now called THE WORD COLLECTOR. I hope this book inspires kids–and grown up kids- to have their “word radar” switched on and find their own words and then use them to share what they know and how they’ll change the world with them.

Here’s an exclusive, never before seen, for your eyes only, look at the cover of The Word Collector by Peter H. Reynolds, coming in early 2018 from Scholastic.

From the publisher:

THE WORD COLLECTOR features a boy named Jerome who—spoiler!—collects words. He starts out collecting interesting ones that he finds, but one day when his pile of words gets jumbled, a few of them land next to each other in evocative ways that prompts him to explore the power of storytelling. As always, the art in this is Peter’s colorful, playful signature style. What I love about this one is that it gets more into the power of words, as his previous books have delved into the power of art.