Raymond Almiran Montgomery, publisher and author of the wildly popular Choose Your Own Adventure series for children, died on Sunday, November 9. He was 78.
A theme of his life was developing innovative methods of teaching young students. At the Wall Street Journal, he encouraged teachers to use the paper in their curriculum. At Columbia University, he was assistant dean of faulty. In 1966, he founded the Waitsfield Summer School in Waitsfield, Vt., to help children with learning challenges (the English curriculum was experientially based and gaming was used exclusively to teach basic math).
He then worked at the think tank Clark Abt Associates in Cambridge, Mass., and after that developed the Energy Environment Game for the Edison Electric Institute and designed role-playing programs for training Peace Corps volunteers in cultural awareness and sensitivity.
In 1975, he co-founded Vermont Crossroads Press to publish books for young readers, but the press soon expanded its purview, publishing, among other titles, The Centered Skier by Denise McCluggage and The Woodburner's Encyclopedia.
In 1977, Choose Your Own Adventure was born, when he published Ed Packard's interactive children's book Sugarcane Island, announcing it as the first in a series called the Adventures of You. Packard left to write a different book for another press, so Montgomery wrote the next book in the series, Journey Under the Sea, using the pen name Robert Mountain. After selling his interest in the publishing house, he took the series to Bantam, where the series was renamed Choose Your Own Adventure, which went on to sell more than 250 million copies across more than 230 titles in more than 40 languages. Montgomery, Packard and others wrote the books.
In 2003, Montgomery and his wife, Shannon Gilligan, founded Chooseco, which re-launched the series and has sold 10 million copies of 65 Choose Your Own Adventure titles since then. Montgomery's last book in the series, Gus vs. the Robot King, was published in September.
