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. We are on our fifteenth reprint of some of our titles.

“We’ve never seen a phenomenon like it in our thirty years of publishing.

“The artwork itself is sophisticated––not like a car or a bunny with a bow in its hair.”Ĭoloring 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. “If someone saw you coloring in one of my books, they wouldn’t give you a weird look, because it’s the same kind of artwork you would see on a champagne bottle,” Basford told me. Since the book’s release, in 2013, it has sold about two million copies worldwide for a time earlier this year, “Secret Garden” and a follow-up, “Enchanted Forest: An Inky Quest and Coloring Book,” were the two best-selling books on Amazon. The publishers were convinced, and ultimately ordered an initial print run for “Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Coloring Book” of thirteen thousand copies. For years, she told her publishers, her clients had loved to color in her black-and-white patterns. Basford suggested instead that she draw one for adults. In 2011, the British publishing house Laurence King asked Johanna Basford, a Scottish artist and commercial illustrator specializing in hand-drawn black-and-white patterns for wine labels and perfume vials, to draw a children’s coloring book.

An inky quest and colouring book