Keith Helmuth grew up with a mother who read to her children¿-¿A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, and The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a book she loved and read aloud to her whole family gathered for repeated winter evenings at the dining room table after supper. He learned to read by picking up the adventure novels his older brother and sister brought home from the bookmobile service that made regular stops at their school in Aurora, Ohiö-Shadow in the Pines by Stephen W. Meader and Spirit of the Border by Zane Grey, for example. The opportunity for employment in the book business while still at university, led to a multi-faceted vocation: bookseller, bookstore manager, college librarian, college teacher, editor, and publisher, in addition to being a community development activist, small-scale farmer and market gardener. Keith Helmuth was the delegate representing the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Canada to the 1990 World Council of Churches' Convocation on Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation in Seoul, Korea, where he served as a consultant to the drafting committee for the Convocation's final report. In 2003, he was instrumental in founding Quaker Institute for the Future. He lives in Woodstock, New Brunswick, where he and his wife, Ellen, maintain a big garden and a small greenhouse.