The first question is — why? Why have colouring books for grown-ups suddenly become a thing? On Amazon’s page of the bestselling books in this country, five of the top 11 are for overgrown toddlers with mortgages trying not to go over the lines. A single author holds the top two spots on the equivalent American list.
She turns out to be a fittingly bewildered Aberdonian named Johanna Basford. I meet her over dry club sandwiches in a windowless room at a hotel “business centre” next to Heathrow airport. Branding agents, publishers and others are forming a procession to see her: she has flown down for the day, she tells me: “And asked everyone to come to me. And when you sell a million books, you can demand cheeky things like that.”
The 31-year-old, who was a freelance illustrator on roughly the minimum wage a few years ago, has sold about 1.4m books since 2012, single-handedly inventing the most lucrative new genre in publishing.
Her pictures are whimsical, tricksy and trippy: swirling, 2D scapes of animals, trees, flowers, insects, houses and impossible gardens, with a rural aesthetic born of the environment in which she draws them. Basford works in an attic studio in the house she shares with her nine-month-old daughter and her husband James Watt, the co-founder of the fantastically successful and brash modern brewery BrewDog, which he launched with a £20,000 loan in 2008 and whipped to a turnover of £30m last year.
I was expecting to meet some lucky and clueless creative, but instead I get Karren Brady crossed with Emma Bridgwater. Basford, like her husband — they met at a fair for young entrepreneurs — is a canny self-promoter and shrewd businesswoman.
Her parents were marine biologists who ran a salmon and trout farm. After graduating from art school in 2005, she moved to London, interning in fashion studios and hating it. “It was all trend-led, I couldn’t put my own stamp on things,” she says. Then the 7/7 bombers struck on a Thursday morning and she “was on the Megabus home that night”.
“Besides,” she adds, “I can’t draw flowers when I’m surrounded by concrete.”
She started a business selling hand-painted wallpaper to “super-high-end hotels, private homes and clients like that”. But the margins were tight and she was reduced to “borrowing Pot Noodles off my mates”.
When the credit crunch hit she realised she was going to go bust, so wound everything down and started hawking herself as a freelance illustrator. She would take the bus to Edinburgh, Glasgow or, for 12 hours overnight, to London, attending meetings, building up her clients, and gradually proving herself to companies that included Nike, Starbucks and Sony.
The drawing that I coloured in
“People are so precious about their artwork,” she says. “It was always part of my marketing strategy to give stuff away.” She uploaded some desktop wallpapers to her website that people could download for free. A publisher liked them and called to ask if she would like to do a children’s colouring-in book. Basford said she would prefer to draw one for adults.
“There was a silence on the other end,” she says. “And then they let me go for it.” The print run of 16,000 sold out quickly: it appealed to a far wider range of people than anyone had predicted.
“I have Wall Street bankers, people in hospital recovering from strokes and other illnesses doing the books,” she says. “Psychologists and therapists tell me they give them to their patients. Teenagers do them to beat exam stress. Lots of people email me to say they’re using the books to get through a tough time.”
I sat down with one of her illustrations: a long, delicately wriggling branch creeping with flowers and ferns. Within minutes I was absorbed. There is a deep, meditative, industrious calm, only faintly childlike, to the act of colouring: a gentle pleasure in an engrossing but unintellectual task, where the only thing you have to think about is whether or not a petal should be blue. When I finished I felt a giddy, embarrassing and fleeting pride. I wanted to turn round and show my page to Mummy.
Today, across the planet, fully grown men and women are forming clubs where they meet to colour-in. Basford is huge in South Korea and in France, where roughly one in three people is on antidepressants.
Our society in many ways is increasingly and weirdly infantilised, from the phoney baby language of the internet (tweet, Google, selfie, cloud) to onesies and the unironic enjoyment of video games and children’s movies. I ask Basford whether adult colouring-in is just another gaga fad.
“Of course it’s only a trend,” says Basford. “The time will come when this doesn’t sell so well, when it’s tomorrow’s bespoke, handpainted wallpaper.”
Secret Garden and Enchanted Forest by Johanna Basford are published by Laurence King in paperback at £9.95