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Christian Dittus
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English

HOW TO DO NOTHING WITH NOBODY ALL ALONE BY YOURSELF

Robert Paul Smith

Remember how to fold a paper airplane?
What to do with a discarded umbrella?
How to make a pin piano?

You don't? You've forgotten? Or you never learned these things in the first place, to forget in the second place? Well, Robert Paul Smith remembered and set it down just for you?and everyone else?these things and many others, like broken-umbrella bows and arrows; and slings;and clamshell bracelets, and the collection, care, and use of horse chestnuts.

This is a handbook on how to avoid boredom, a primer on solitude, a stand-in for "screen time." This is a child's declaration of independence. Smith tells you “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. It's a book for kids, but parents are not prohibited from reading it.

Robert Paul Smith is the author of the best-selling Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing. and of the novels So It Doesn't Whistle, The Journey, Because of My Love, and The Time and the Place. Smith was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, and graduated from Columbia College in 1936. He worked as a writer with CBS Radio.
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Published 2023-05-11 by Tin House Books

Comments

This classic 1958 guide reintroduces kids to those natural urges that have to turn random objects into crazy great stuff...Readers will love that everything in this book was invented by kids and passed along by kids, that nothing costs money and that each of the projects is a seat-of-the-pants creation. -- Where the Best Books Are!

Had I known about it, Robert Paul Smith's 1958 book, 'How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself,' would have been my Bible. Smith gets down to the nitty-gritty on the first page: 'These are things you can do by yourself,' he writes. 'You don't need any help from your mother or your father or anybody.'

What a joy to give children something they can do without 'hollering for help'...How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself is replete with the sort of fun that childhood should be, and too rarely is. -- Blogcritics.com

It's what you'd get if you crossed the Boy Scout Handbook with The Anarchist's Cookbook, and it's definitely the wildest how-to manual I've seen this year. -- Greg Cowles, The New York Times Paper Cuts blog