Everything I Know How to Do, I Owe to the Klutz Books
How else would I have learned to do magic tricks, make friendship bracelets, or braid hair?
--
When I close my eyes I can see my childhood bookshelf. There’s the light blue Laura Ingalls Wilder box set, the copy of Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, the “Dear America” books with the built-in fabric bookmarks (in retrospect, possibly problematic or at least historically questionable), the copy of the The Care And Keeping Of You, an American Girl book that was wordlessly handed to me when I was 9 years old. There’s all of my dad’s old cartoon and comic books that got passed down to me, a stack of Judy Blume paperbacks, and years of Highlights magazines.
But there’s a part of the bookshelf where the books don’t sit nicely side by side. The books are slightly oversized and jut out at odd angles because of the plastic pouches attached to the spiral wire that binds the book. That’s right, it’s my collection of Klutz books.
The first book Klutz Press ever published was Juggling for the Complete Klutz, which arrived in the world in 1977 and came with an attached mesh bag full of little beanbags. I did not own the juggling book, but I did come into possession of several other books in the Klutz family, including Klutz: Cat’s Cradle, Klutz Nail Art, Klutz: Painted Rocks, Klutz: Potholders and other Loopy Projects, and probably a bunch of others I’ve since forgotten.
I started to get the Klutz books as gifts in the late 1990s, around the time we moved to Pennsylvania and I was the new kid in school. They were ubiquitous at Scholastic book fairs, but I remember getting them as birthday or Christmas or Easter gifts mostly — they were books for special occasions. As the oldest child, I didn’t have the benefit of learning all of the small but still incredibly meaningful crafts and hobbies that serve as symbols of girlhood that my younger sister would eventually learn from me—like how to braid your hair or cut your own bangs (it turns out you should never do this. Klutz books filled that void.
Each Klutz book felt like a secret guide to some mysterious craft or hobby, something to teach me a very small thing about how the world worked with the added bonus of learning how to be more…
