Flat Stanley (aka Stanley Lambchop) is a lovable character from Flat Stanley, a book about a boy who gets squashed by a bulletin board and then happily discovers that he’s slim enough to travel in an envelope.

In 1995, third-grade teacher Dale Hubert, from London, Ontario, was searching for a way to inject a bit of pizzazz into his literary-arts curriculum. Hubert found immediate inspiration in Stanley Lambchop.

Thinking about the ways that life can imitate art, Hubert launched what he called the Flat Stanley Project. He asked his students to create their own “flat people” out of paper and to write stories about their adventures in a journal. Then, they sent the flat people and the journals out to classrooms throughout North America that Hubert had contacted using what was, at the time, a new technology: the Internet.