How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself: A Timeless Activity Guide to Self-Reliant Play and Joyful Solitude - Softcover

Smith, Robert Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1941040659 ISBN 13: 9781941040652

Publisher: Tin House Books, 2017

Synopsis

A handbook on how to avoid boredom, a primer on solitude, a child's declaration of independence. 

Remember how to fold a paper airplane?  

What to do with a discarded umbrella?  

How to make a pin piano?  

You don’t? You’ve forgotten? Or you never learned these things in the first place, to forget in the second place?   Well, Robert Paul Smith remembered and set it down just for you―and everyone else―these things and many others, like broken-umbrella bows and arrows; and slings;and clamshell bracelets, and the collection, care, and use of horse chestnuts.  

This is a handbook on how to avoid boredom, a primer on solitude, a stand-in for "screen time." This is a child's declaration of independence. Smith tells you “how to do nothing with nobody all alone by yourself”―real things, fascinating things, the things that you did when you were a kid, or your parents did when they were kids. It’s a book for kids, but parents are not prohibited from reading it.

Line drawings throughout

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Paul Smith is the author of the best-selling Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing. and of the novels So It Doesn’t Whistle, The Journey, Because of My Love, and The Time and the Place. Smith was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, and graduated from Columbia College in 1936. He worked as a writer with CBS Radio.

Paul Collins is a writer specializing in history, memoir, and unusual antiquarian literature. His nine books have been translated into eleven languages, and include Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books (2003) and The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (2011). Collins lives in Oregon, where he is chair and professor of English at Portland State University.

Review:

"Every great book reminds us that we're all alone in the world. At least this one provides us with the means to entertain ourselves while we're here." — Lemony Snicket

"It's what you'd get if you crossed the Boy Scout Handbook with The Anarchist's Cookbook, and it's definitely the wildest how-to manual I've seen this year." —Greg Cowles, The New York Times Paper Cuts blog
"What a joy to give children something they can do without 'hollering for help'...How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself is replete with the sort of fun that childhood should be, and too rarely is." —Blogcritics.com

"His book is timeless and remarkably timely in both spirit and hands-on ingenuity." —Brainpickings

"Had I known about it, Robert Paul Smith's 1958 book, 'How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself,' would have been my Bible. Smith gets down to the nitty-gritty on the first page: 'These are things you can do by yourself,' he writes. 'You don't need any help from your mother or your father or anybody.'"—Laurie Hertzel, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"This classic 1958 guide reintroduces kids to those natural urges that have to turn random objects into crazy great stuff...Readers will love that everything in this book was invented by kids and passed along by kids, that nothing costs money and that each of the projects is a seat-of-the-pants creation."—Where the Best Books Are!

"You'll never hear 'I'm bored' again with this illustrated guide to simple, nostalgic fun."—Canadian Family

About this edition

• Publisher: Tin House Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1941040659
• ISBN 13: 9781941040652
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 136