Austin Kleon

Read Like an Artist Zine + Independent Bookstore Day 2022 events

To celebrate Independent Bookstore Day 2022 and the 10th anniversary of the Steal Like an Artist, my publisher Workman and I produced a free 12-page glossy zine called “Read Like an Artist,” with 10 tips for a better life with books.

Here is a very short list of the bookstores who ordered a ton (250+) of copies:

There are literally hundreds of bookstores participating, so check with your favorite local indie to see if they got copies!

If you live in Austin, Texas or nearby, on Saturday, April 30, I’ll be at two of my favorite bookstores here in town, signing and drawing in my books and hand-selling my favorites.

10AM-12PM – I’ll be at Bookpeople, our flagship store in town. Get there early — they should have around 100 zines.

2PM-4PM – I’ll be at Black Pearl Books, my hyper-local neighborhood shop. They’ll have about 25 zines, so they might be out by the time I show up.

Our friends at Bookwoman should have about 100 copies, too, so that might actually be your best bet for snagging one in the 512 area code. (If you’re down south, I just found out that Reverie Books has a handful, too.)

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Stolen plants always grow

a lifted type collage

In a letter to a friend, Beatrix Potter wrote about her recent adventures in “proplifting,”

Mrs Satterthwaite says stolen plants always grow, I stole some ‘honesty’ yesterday, it was put to be burnt in a heap of refuse! I have had something out of nearly ever garden in the village.

Elsewhere, she said she was relieved when people offered her plants. “I don’t feel like such a robber of the village gardens.”

(h/t @brookemackey, Source: Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life)

Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics

My May pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is one of my all-time favorites and a bonafide classic: Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. To join our discussion next month, sign up now.

Here’s my intro:

This a comic book about comic books. But it’s also much more than that: using the medium of comics, Scott McCloud explains a whole world of visual communication and teaches lessons that apply to anyone working in any kind of visual medium. To quote Art Spiegelman, the “simple-looking tome deconstructs the secret language of comics while casually revealing secrets of time, space, art and the cosmos!”  Originally published in the early 90s, this book has become a contemporary classic, and is in my top 10 all-time influential books on my own practice. Even if you’re not at all interested in comics, I promise that you will learn something from McCloud. And who knows? It might even open up a whole genre for you. I love this book because after you read it, you see the whole world differently. 

To join our discussion, sign up for the club.

How I copy quotes from a library book

Instagram has once again changed its algorithm, this time rewarding accounts that post short “Reels.” (They’re also pretty much destroying small businesses who have built up an audience on the platform.)

Luckily, I don’t run my business off Instagram, but I have been experimenting with Reels as a little creative challenge, mostly to see if you really can convince the algorithm to pay attention to you. (You can.)

I have 151k+ followers on Instagram, but most of my posts barely crack 500 and max out at about 1000 or 2000 likes. This “How I copy quotes out of library books” post I made about using the iPhone’s “Live Text” feature took me about 5 minutes to make and cracked 6k likes. (This is not, by the way, how I want to plan my days, I was just curious.)

Re: the quote-copying: I got some good replies. One of the most helpful: you can do Live Text straight from the Notes app, just open a note and click a blank space and the icon appears. (Other people told me Android has done this kind of live OCR for years and I should get Readwise.)

The funny thing is that I actually believe strongly in copying quotes by hand or typing out poems. When you go to the actual trouble of copying with your fingers, I think you have to pay more attention to the quote — you really read it…

Self-expression

1. “People think it’s about, like, self-expression or something, and it’s not about that. You do it because it’s involving and stimulating and you like the process of doing it.”
—Ethan Coen

2. “I express myself with my friends and my family. In my diary if I had one, that’s expressing yourself. Novels are not about expressing yourself, they’re about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.”
—Zadie Smith

3. “The material should be filtered through you rather than your filtering yourself through the material. Self-expression is a natural by-product of your work, because you are doing it. If the purpose of the project is to express yourself, there is a danger there will be no surprises. The growth that can happen discovering solutions to specific problems (goals) may be missed if we are too insistent on projecting a personal message.”
—Corita Kent and Jan Stewart, Learning By Heart

4. “The suppression of self-expression is impossible. Even when we do something as seemingly “uncreative” as retyping a few pages, we express ourselves in a variety of ways. The act of choosing and reframing tells us as much about ourselves as our story about our mother’s cancer operation. It’s just that we’ve never been taught to value such choices.”
—Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing

5. “Work is self-expression. We must not think of self-expression as something we may do or something we may not do. Self-expression is inevitable. In your work, in the way you do your work and in the results of your work, your self is expressed.”
—Agnes Martin

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Thanks to David Epstein for the Coen quote that inspired me to pull these together from my archives!

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