Business Insight Zone

Today we’re happy to celebrate one of our own for his extra-curricular endeavors: it’s the official release date for The Day-Glo Brothers, the first published book by long-time Hooverite Chris Barton.

The book chronicles the invention of day-glo colors by Joe and Bob Switzer, brothers who collaborated in the 1930s and 1940s to make the daylight-fluorescent pigments that we take for granted today when we see things like safety cones and highlighters. Chris actually stumbled across their story while doing his job here:

The project started at Hoover’s, actually. In August 1997, when I was in [the] Editorial [department], I read Bob Switzer’s obituary in the New York Times. I started writing for kids about three years later, and the Switzers’ story had stuck with me all that time. I started researching it in mid-2001.

Chris is wry about the very long time it can take to bring an illustrated book like this to fruition, pointing out that it’s taken eight years to produce a 48-page book. But he’s also highly methodical in his pursuit of writing projects outside his duties as a senior business analyst in the Hoover’s IT department:

I get up at 5 a.m. six days a week — seven days a week, when I’m on deadline. Most lunch hours, I spend writing or researching. If I have any free time in the evenings, I’m probably working on something related to my writing.

Besides his own patient efforts to build his audience through his blog, Chris benefits from the outstanding job that Charlesbridge did in publishing the book. Tony Persiani’s cheerful illustrations include swathes of the day-glo colors Fire Orange, Signal Green, and Saturn Yellow.

Charlesbridge also set up a page with animations that explain the difference between regular light, regular fluorescence, and day-glo fluorescence. Even better, Wired ran a blurb on the book last week. And if you’re in Austin, you can join Chris and many of his friends and fans for a book party on July 11 at BookPeople.

This isn’t the last you’ll hear from Chris, either: he already has several other books for children under contract, including a picture book “a lot sillier” than The Day-Glo Brothers that should be out from Little, Brown in early 2010.

Congratulations, Chris!

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Bonus Coverage at the “Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast” blog, including an interview with Barton and Persiani and a generous peek at sample pages from the book. Check it out!

BONUS Bonus: The Day-Glo Brothers just earned a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly!

UPDATE — Wednesday afternoon: WOW! The Day-Glo Brothers lands a review in BoingBoing!

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Category: Hoover's