A year and a half ago, members of the board of the Historical Society of Mount Lebanon started kicking around an idea: to design a coloring book that featured the municipality's landmarks and history.

Dick Price, 79, a retired Pittsburgh Public Schools English teacher, volunteered to lead the project, and sent letters to as many Mt. Lebanon-based artists, architects and art teachers as he could find, asking if they could draw an image to go along with the captions about Mt. Lebanon.

Fifteen artists responded and volunteered their renderings of Mt. Lebanon history, and the result is the book "Mount Lebanon: A Town of Colorful History."

"The project really grew, because I didn't envision that it would be 76 pages long," Mr. Price said.

The historical society uses "Mount," while the municipality uses "Mt.," because "Mount" is how the name appeared in a document at the community's founding. The society's organizers believed that was the community's founders' intention.

The book starts with drawings of nature in Mt. Lebanon, then its earliest settlers, its oldest buildings and locations people would recognize today, such as Bird Park and the Mt. Lebanon Municipal Building.

"One of the things I like most about the book is it is so many different styles of artwork," Mr. Price said.

"You have cartoonish type of stuff, and you have architectural stuff."

Mr. Price wrote the captions, using his own knowledge from living in Mt. Lebanon and the historical photographs and documents archived at the History Center. He also drew a few of the pictures.

Mr. Price recruited a third-grader to look over the book, and once she said she could read and understand it, the Historical Society published it.

The reaction to the book has been positive, Mr. Price said.

"I think it gets the kids interested in history at an early age, and gives them a sense of history, a sense of curiosity so that they want to go find out more," he said.

And, he said, there are a lot of adults reading it as well.

The coloring books, which cost $10 each, are being sold at several locations, including the Mt. Lebanon Public Library, Rollier's Hardware, Atria's Restaurant, Uptown Coffee, the Art Loft, Lee Heckman Custom Framing, Koolcat Designs and the A.B. Charles Hobby Shop in Mt. Lebanon and the Heinz History Center in the Strip District.

All proceeds go to the historical society.