It's not every day that a world-renowned author visits your town.

It's even less often that an author who has been honored by the queen of the United Kingdom visits your town.

But, that was just the case when Barbara Bell, a best-selling author and renowned Latin teacher, visited Laurel earlier this month.

Bell, the British author of the Minimus series of books, visited Laurel as part of a national tour aimed at promoting her book and helping train teachers in Latin.

"We're an endangered species," Bell said of Latin teachers and experts. "And I think that is a shame because languages are a marvelous thing and must be shown in an exciting light."

The Minimus books are a series of school textbooks published by the Cambridge University Press, designed to help children of primary school age learn Latin. The series is named after Minimus, a character in the book known as"the mouse that made Latin cool."

Now in its 10th year of publishing, the book has sold 100,000 in the United Kingdom and is rapidly spreading in popularity in the United States.

"This is a very big deal," said Ruth Ann Besse, a former Latin teacher at Pallotti High who helped organize Bell's trip to Laurel. "It's an amazing opportunity for so many people to meet Barbara, but also to understand how to utilize Minimus."

Bell, who has taught Latin, Greek and classics at Clifton High School in Bristol, England, for 35 years, got her start as a Latin teacher after taking a course in the language as a 12-year-old.

"I remember the Latin text being so boring," she said. "But my teacher absolutely brought it to life and I realized how fun Latin can be. I haven't looked back since."

After getting a degree in classics at the University of London, Bell began teaching.

About 15 years ago, she noticed, despite her best hopes, that interest in Latin was declining, something she partially attributed to the blandness of the textbooks used to teach the course.

"I truly didn't want this generation to miss out on Latin," she said. "People view it as elitist or useless, and I'm fighting against that. I think it's the most useful, relevant subject there is."

Bell set about creating a book that she hoped would draw the interest of children at a young age. After five years of writing and editing, "Minimus: Starting out in Latin" hit the shelves.

The books revolve around a family of mice living in Vindolanda, a Roman fort in northern Great Britain.

The cross-curricular book -- it has a Greek myth relating to Latin in every chapter, as well as modern English words with Latin roots -- quickly grew in popularity.

The series became such a huge phenomenon in the United Kingdom that Bell is set to be honored by Queen Elizabeth II this fall with a membership in the Order of the British Empire.

"It's interactive and it really speaks to the student rather than just presenting the language," Besse said.

Besse, in fact, was so enthralled by the first book that she made it her goal to try and spread it through Maryland as quickly as possible.

After meeting Bell at a classical languages convention in Ohio, Besse also began corresponding with Bell and helping her coordinate her Latin teacher training efforts in the United States.

That effort culminated in Bell's current tour of the United States, which is taking her to New York, Pittsburgh and Laurel to train a new wave of teachers in Latin and how to use Minimus for teaching.

While in Laurel, Bell trained 13 teachers in a July 17 session at St. Vincent Pallotti High School.

"It was thrilling," Bell said. "And best of all, it became an information swap. It wasn't a one-way street. Teachers were giving us information on how they were teaching (Latin). It was wonderful."

Besse also coordinated a children's event at Laurel Library on July 19 complete with copies of the book, ancient games and Roman reenactors.

"It was a great chance for kids to discover this amazing language," Besse said. "Some of them might never even have heard of Latin, but they were seeing reenactors and everything."

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