Authors & Writing: John Kropf

Join John Kropf for a workshop at 1:30 p.m. Monday, Aug. 14 as part of Lakeside’s Authors & Writing Series. This workshop, titled “Color Capital of the World: Growing Up with a Legacy of a Crayon Company,” will be held in the Fountain Inn Aigler Room.

Following the Civil War, three entrepreneurial families took their innovative ideas for school chalk from the kitchen stove and transformed them into the American Crayon Company in Sandusky, Ohio. Kropf’s book, Color Capital of the World, tells this story through the eyes of one of the founding family’s descendants tracing the cycle of build, boom and bust. Readers will come away feeling a greater appreciation of the human story behind the crayon and the Ohio town that produced more crayons and paints than anywhere else in the world.

John Kropf is the author of Color Capital of the World: Growing Up with the Legacy of a Crayon Company. His previous book, Unknown Sands: Journeys Around the World’s Most Isolated Country, was praised as “a fascinating narrative bound to hook adventurers” by Publisher’s Weekly. His writing has appeared in appeared The Baltimore Sun, Florida Sun-Sentinel, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Kropf was born in Sandusky and raised in Erie County, Ohio. He is an attorney in Washington, D.C.