Coloring Books for Adults Top Amazon’s Best-Seller List

The best-selling book on Amazon.com in the U.S. right now is not Harper Lee’s new novel or a title from George R.R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones” but a coloring book for adults by Scottish illustrator Johanna Basford.

The Guardian reports:

Basford’s intricately drawn pictures of flora and fauna in Secret Garden have sold 1.4m copies worldwide to date, with the newly released follow-up Enchanted Forest selling just under 226,000 copies already. They have drawn fans from Zooey Deschanel, who shared a link about the book with her Facebook followers, to the South Korean pop star Kim Ki-Bum, who posted an image on Instagram for his 1.6 million followers.

“It’s been crazy. The last few weeks since Enchanted Forest came out have been utter madness, but fantastic madness,” said Eleanor Blatherwick, head of sales and marketing at the books’ publisher, small British press Laurence King. “We knew the books would be beautiful but we didn’t realise it would be such a phenomenal success.” …

“I think it is really relaxing, to do something analogue, to unplug,” said Basford. “And it’s creative. For many people, a blank sheet is very daunting; with a colouring book you just need to bring the colour. Also there’s a bit of nostalgia there. So many people have said to me that they used to do secret colouring in when their kids were in bed. Now it is socially acceptable, it’s a category of its own. These are books for adults. The art in my books is super intricate.”

In June 2014 The Guardian reported that adults were increasingly turning to coloring books as a form of therapy to treat stress, anxiety and depression.

Adult colouring-in books are now a thing, and craft-loving, artsy people the world over are regressing to the mental age of seven. When they’re not playing Candy Crush or Flappy Bird, busy city-dwellers are turning to crayons and felt-tips for their soothing and therapeutic qualities. While in the past people had to wait until they had children to sneakily rediscover the joys of colouring-in, now you can proudly buy colouring books for yourself alone.

Read more here.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.