BROOKE Three of Amazon’s top-10 best-selling books last year were coloring books. The “Secret Garden” and “Enchanted Forest” by Johanna Basford together sold more than 13 million copies worldwide. A new trend?
Not entirely. In the Kennedy era, adult coloring books were chart toppers…
STREISAND: “For those who fancy coloring books / as certain people do. / Here’s a new one for you / A most unusual coloring book, the kind you never see / Crayons ready, very well, begin to color me … ”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50tdDpwfXvo
Barbra Streisand’s 1962 hit riffed on the fact that sales of adult coloring books that year had reached a million bucks..
STREISAND: “This is the heart that thought he would always be true. / Color it blue”
BROOKE: But where today’s coloring books are marketed as therapeutic, stress-relieving, creativity engines, the coloring books of the 60s, were decidedly more subversive. In a recent New Republic, Laura Marsh filled in the details.
