By Robert Paul Smith
Illustrated by Elinor Goulding Smith
Introduction by Paul Collins

New York Times Best-seller

How to Do Nothing literally tells "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. This is a book to free your kid from video games for a few hours, a handbook on the avoidance of boredom, a primer on the uses of solitude, a child's declaration of independence.

If you don't remember how to make a spool tank, what to do with an old umbrella, whether "pennies" come before or after "spank the baby" in mumbly-peg, or how to make rubber-band guns, slings, or clamshell bracelets, it's OK because Robert Paul Smith has collected all of this and more in How to Do Nothing. 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.