"Why Adults Are Buying Coloring Books (for Themselves)"

"Coloring books for adults have been around for decades, but Basford’s success—combined with that of the French publisher Hachette Pratique’s “Art-thérapie: 100 coloriages anti-stress” (2012), which has sold more than three and a half million copies worldwide, and Dover Publishing’s “Creative Haven” line for “experienced colorists,” which launched in 2012 and sold four hundred thousand copies this May alone—has helped to create a massive new industry category. “We’ve never seen a phenomenon like it in our thirty years of publishing. We are on our fifteenth reprint of some of our titles. Just can’t keep them in print fast enough,” Lesley O’Mara, the managing director of British publishers Michael O’Mara Books, wrote to me about their own adult-coloring-books catalogue...

Summer camps for adults, for example, have also gone from curiosity to viable enterprise... Another example is Preschool Mastermind, a series of weekly preschool classes for adults in Brooklyn...

Brown went on to found the National Institute for Play, in 2006, which argues for the benefits of playtime for people of all ages. In his book “Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul” (2010), he writes, for example, of “Laurel,” a C.E.O. whose “irrational bliss” during horseback riding and spontaneous play “has spilled over into her family and work.” Such anecdotes have been backed by some psychological research...

[however] According to Jacoby, adults who immerse themselves in escapist fantasies like coloring books, camps, and preschool are regressing into safe patterns in order to avoid confronting the world around them. “I think the whole popularity of young-adult literature is a general decline of people not wanting to do things that require effort,” she said."
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-adults-are-buying-coloring-books-for-themselves?mbid=social_facebook

I wonder what would have come up if you googled "Adult coloring book" five years ago...

Loving the term "Peter Pan market" here. I noticed this a lot in DC. And I've recently been talking to a lot of people about the experience of growing up in my small town and so I wonder if there isn't something here about the way our generation was parented. Someone said to me that we had short childhoods but a long adolescence.

Like, compared to some platonic ideal of childhood from the 50s in America, or all those books set in Edwardian England, we had much less time to play and be free before we were expected to be building toward our futures and experiencing some of the more complicated realities of the world. However, we also were not expected to be all done by our 20s, with families and steady jobs.

I think the "we" I am using here is people who grew up in places like my hometown, but I find myself tempted to generalize - although that's probably because I am privileged to see people similar to me in that way represented in media (hi New Girl) and being around writers for the New Yorker. And, like, writing for the New Yorker