Kid’s Handmade Book, Snuck Into Library, Now Has A Years-Long Waiting List

Image via Ada Community Library

At just eight years old, Dillon Helbig is a published book author whose work can be viewed at the library.

The boy from Boise, Idaho, wrote about a fictional time when a star he had placed on a Christmas tree exploded, taking him back to the first Thanksgiving. The book is self-illustrated in color pencils too, and the entire process took him four days.

Helbig doesn’t have an agent, however, so he got himself approved in his own way.

The book, entitled The Adventures of Dillon Helbig’s Crismis and signed by “Dillon His Self,” was personally taken to the Ada Community Library’s Lake Hazel Branch during a trip with his grandmother, before being secretly deposited into one of its shelves. The second-grader kept it a secret until later, when he told his mother.

“I always be sneaky, like how I get chocolate,” Helbig told local news network KTVB.

When mother and son returned to the library a couple of days later, the red-cover journal was nowhere to be seen. The two asked the staff about it and urged them not to throw the storybook away.

The librarians had seen the notebook but thought it “far too obviously precious” to get rid of, recounted the library’s branch manager Alex Hartman.

Hartman read Helbig’s tale to his six-year-old son, who enjoyed it a lot and said it was one of the funniest stories he had come across. For a preview, Helbig started “Chaptr 1” with “ONe Day in wintr it wus Crismis!”

“He just genuinely wanted other people to be able to enjoy his story,” said Hartman. “He’s been a lifelong library user, so he knows how books are shared.”

The book, although unorthodox, was deemed to have met the library’s selection criteria, so the staff asked the family if they could assign it a barcode and have it loaned out to patrons. The eight-year-old and his parents were elated, of course.

The Adventures of Dillon Helbig by Dillon His Self is now classified as a graphic novel for children, teens, and adults. Helbig has also been given the library’s inaugural Whoodini Award (Whoodini is its owl mascot) for Best Young Novelist, a prize created especially for him. 

As of Saturday, January 29, the one copy has received a waitlist of 55 readers. Each borrowing round lasts up to four weeks, with no extensions allowed due to the long line. With all that demand, the library is hoping to digitize it into an e-book.

The young author is now working on a sequel to the book, which involves his dog, Rusty, and the Grinch.

Helbig’s proactive approach has inspired his classmates to write their own stories. “It’s pretty neat to see how he’s inspiring little minds,” said his mother Susan Helbig.

[via The Washington Post, New York Times, KTVB, images via Ada Community Library]