“There was just so much heart in Matthew’s drawings and the story he was telling, we knew it was a book that children would respond to,” she added. “From the moment we received Rumple Buttercup on submission, we felt there was something special here,” said Mallory Loehr, senior v-p and publisher at Random House Books for Young Readers.
His publishing team at Random House felt the love he put into his creation straight away. “The Random House publishers came to the meeting with banana peels on their heads, and I was immediately enchanted,” said Gubler.
#Rumple buttercup professional#
After spending time refining it, and making sure that every one of Rumple’s expressions was just right, I was off to self-publish, but someone talked me into showing it to professional publishing houses.”Īccording to Gubler, Random House quickly proved a good fit for his project, thanks to what he considered an exceptionally winning gesture at their first appointment. “I grabbed some melted crayons and a stack of old blank journals, and wrote it all down. “I love telling stories, and Rumple popped into my noggin a little while ago while I was eating mint chip ice cream and staring at a banister made of lacquered wood,” he recalled. Gubler credits a sweet treat with helping to spark his imagination where Rumple is concerned. “I hand-made every centimeter of every page with love, including the barcodes and copyright page, and I like to think that the hard work and sincerity translates.” In addition, he believes the unusual handcrafted look of the book may draw some people in. “I think we all feel like Rumples!” Gubler said, assessing what may account for some of the book’s appeal to readers. He only feels confident emerging under the cover of night with a banana peel hat on his head, until a chain of events helps him to discover that no one cares that he’s different, and to embrace his uniqueness. In Gubler’s tale, sensitive monster Rumple Buttercup is so certain that his green skin, “5 crooked teeth” and “3 strands of hair,” will frighten people, he stays underground-literally-living in a sewer.
To date, Random House has gone back to press twice for a total of 100,000 copies in print. The book was published on April 2 with a 50,000-copy first printing and became an instant number-one New York Times bestseller, snagging the top spot on the New York Times’s Middle Grade Hardcover list. And, in his life off the set, Gubler expresses his creativity through filmmaking, painting, and, most recently, writing and illustrating his first children’s book, Rumple Buttercup: A Story of Bananas, Belonging, and Being Yourself (Random House, Apr.), a hand-lettered and illustrated 136-page fable about a “weird,” lonely, and very self-conscious green monster.
On the long-running CBS program Criminal Minds, he stars as super-genius Spencer Reid, the youngest member of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Matthew Gray Gubler is not an FBI profiler, but he plays one on TV.
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