About HappyDance Books

HappyDance Books is a small publisher in Dallas, Texas. We make activity books for little hands, and we build them from the research up.

Why we started

Walk through the children's activity aisle and you will find a lot of books making a lot of promises. Very few of them can tell you where the promise came from. We thought a small publisher could do better by reading the literature first, designing to it, and being plain about the limits.

That is the whole idea. Read the evidence, build the book it points to, and publish the claims we decided we could not make.

How the books are made

Every character is drawn in an original line-art system we built ourselves. Each fish, turtle and crab is described in code and rendered the same way every time, which means the whale on the cover is the same whale on page four, at any size, forever.

It also means we can be exact about the things we promise. When a book says the lines get finer as it goes on, that is a measured property of the artwork, not a figure of speech. Every character gets the same face language — a ring-and-pupil eye, a brow tick, two cheek freckles, a smile — and no two characters get the same face.

What we promise

• Verifiable facts. No claim goes on a cover that our research review cannot back.
• Very high fidelity art. Original artwork, one house style, reproduced identically everywhere.
• Consistent themes. A shelf of HappyDance books should look like it belongs together.

Get in touch

Questions, corrections, or a research paper we should have read: email us at hello@happydancebooks.com. If you think we have got a claim wrong, we would genuinely like to know.