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

The classic guidebook to everything from paper airplanes to spool tanks to slingshots is back in print, and is as fun, inventive, and charming as ever.

How to Do Nothing literally tells "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. This is a book to free your kid from video games for a few hours, a handbook on the avoidance of boredom, a primer on the uses of solitude, a child's declaration of independence. If you don't remember how to make a spool tank, what to do with an old umbrella, whether "pennies" come before or after "spank the baby" in mumbly-peg, or how to make rubber-band guns, slings, or clamshell bracelets, it's OK because Robert Paul Smith has collected all of this and more in How to Do Nothing. It's a book for kids, but parents are not prohibited from reading it.