Visiting Percy Jackson…in Texas

Today, I am delighted to introduce guest blogger Dr. Miranda Sachs! Miranda studied History at Princeton University, and graduated in 2011. She worked extensively at our library, both in special collections and with me in community outreach. Miranda earned her PhD at Yale, and is now an assistant professor of European History at Texas State University.

That’s where she met Percy Jackson.

Or more accurately, that’s where she visited the Rick Riordan archive in Texas State’s Wittliff Collections. The collections “collect, preserve and present the cultural heritage of Texas, the Southwest & Mexico through works of the region’s storytellers—writers, photographers, musicians, filmmakers and other artists,” and Riordan’s papers and ephemera are part of the Southwestern Writers Collections (along Sandra Cisneros, Sam Shepard, Naomi Shihab Nye, Cormac McCarthy, and J. Frank Dobie to name a few).

Miranda found some incredibly cool stuff, and I will now turn the post over to her very capable hands. Take it away, Miranda!


Many, many years ago I was an undergraduate at Princeton and I had the privilege of working for Dr. Dana. It was the best job ever. I did things like glue lizards onto visors for a Holes watch party or tell jokes using a shark puppet. Dr. Dana introduced me to Percy Jackson and I loved the books. I even got to dress as a Greek lady for Princyclopedia, an event that Dr. Dana used to organize.

Miranda, on right, being fabulous. Department of Special Collections, Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library.

Since my time at Princeton, I’ve become a professor of French history. Imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered that Texas State, the university where I teach, has the personal collection of Rick Riordan, the author of the Percy Jackson books. I reached out to my old friend Dr. Dana and she sent me on a quest to check out what Rick Riordan sent to the Witliff Collections.

Because of the new Lightning Thief mini-series, the library has some of the highlights from Riordan’s collection on display. As soon as I walked in the door, I saw a shirt for Camp Half-Blood. The display case had a replica of Riptide used for the film and some neat photos of Riordan speaking to kids. It also had hand-written copies of stories Riordan wrote as a kid! The room where I got to look at the documents had art on display from the covers of some of the books.

The archivist let me look at some of Rick Riordan’s childhood stories. It turns out that Riordan was writing fantasy and mythology even back then. One story was about a god named Jzais living in a world called Tharcas. He wrote some of these stories by hand and others with a typewriter (yup, he was a kid before the computer.)

All the stories were on the original pieces of paper on which he’d written or typed. It was fun to look at stories he wrote in junior high school (back in 1978) and see comments from his teachers. One story called “The Ring of Fire” received 100/100!

Rick Riordan was a teacher before he was a writer. One of the boxes in the collection includes a photo album with pictures from the final class of students he taught in 2004. Six years later, he went back to visit the school and those kids were seniors. Many of them wrote letters sharing how much he had meant to them as a teacher. They still remembered the story of Gilgamesh because he had told it to them with funny voices. Multiple kids recalled that they had carried out a mock trial using Hammurabi’s Code in his class. It seems that Riordan was a creative teacher who got kids excited about the ancient world even before he published the Percy Jackson books.

My favorite thing to look at was fan letters from kids. Some of the kids were harsh critics. A 7th grader named Caitlyn complained that the books droned on, and it took too long to get to the exciting parts. A boy named Sean was confused why Percy was dry when he came out of the water given that his father was the sea god. Others asked great questions. They wanted to know his favorite character and his favorite band. A girl named Lauren asked “ARE YOU A HALF BLOOD?” Another girl was curious if he would consider casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as Zeus in the film adaptation. (Sorry.)

Mostly, the kids wanted to express how much they loved the books. By the time Sea of Monsters came out, Riordan was getting multiple letters each day. It was super cool to see evidence of how much those books meant to kids. It was also cool to think that Riordan chose to save the kids’ letters. He decided they needed to be preserved in the archive alongside his fancy prizes and the early drafts of his books.

Before I left, I asked to hold Riptide. It was surprisingly heavy. I guess I’m not a demigod…

Photo by Katie Salzmann


We would like to thank Texas State University for so generously sharing their collections, and to Miranda for being awesome (as always!). Miranda is also an author! She published a book all about kids in nineteenth-century Paris called An Age to Work: Working-Class Childhood in Third Republic Paris.

Collections images courtesy of Miranda Sachs

Pan Pipes

groverGet your Grover on with these simple pan pipe necklaces! I designed them for a large-scale Lightning Thief event (you can read more about the event, and our awesome Mythomagic deck here). The pipes were part of a “Pan Pipes & Pythagoras” table hosted by Music Together Princeton Lab School. Since we needed to create several hundred sets of pan pipes (event attendance was around 5,000) I needed something inexpensive that would give kids a little taste of tone and pitch.

I considered PVC pipe, empty marker tubes, empty pen tubes…but they were either too expensive, impractical, too hard to cut, couldn’t produce a satisfactory sound, or required way too much prep time. Happily, the solution came when I stopped by Fruity Yogurt, a local frozen yogurt place. In addition to soft serve, Fruity Yogurt does bubble tea, which naturally comes with a bubble tea straw.

strawsBubble tea straws are thicker than your average drinking straw. I tested a few and they were perfect! Not to mention inexpensive and they come in jolly colors!

You’ll need:

  • At least 4 bubble tea straws
  • A small craft stick (for a 4-straw set of pipes, you’ll need a 3″ craft stick)
  • A 28-29″ piece of yarn
  • A ruler
  • A Sharpie permanent marker
  • Scissors and tape for construction

Start by folding the bottom of each straw up and taping it very tightly (some bubble tea straws have pointed bottoms – you can trim the point off if you’d like).

taped straw Place the folded straw next to a ruler, and use a permanent marker to mark the desired  length of the straw. I cut my straws in 0.5″ increments. So the first straw was 5″, the second straw was 4.5″, the third straw was 4″, and the fourth straw was 3.5″. If you’re doing this at a program or event and don’t want to fiddle with a bunch of rulers, you can use this straw measurement template.

marked straw I did some experimenting with how long or how short a straw can be before it starts losing its tone. Based on my experiments, I wouldn’t go any longer than 7.5″ and no shorter than 2.5″. Beyond those lengths, the straws seem to lose their ability to hold a note.

Next, knot the yarn on both ends of the craft stick, and reinforce the knots with tape.

attached yarnLine all your straws next to each other in ascending order. Make sure the top (i.e. the open ends) of the straws are even with one another. Secure them with a piece of tape.

taped pipesThen flip the pipes over and tape the craft stick on the other side! Done!

finished pipes