The 10 Best Adult Coloring Books

13 Unexpectedly Great Times to Color

We all have busy lives, but wouldn't it be nice to spend some time relieving that stress and business with some coloring?

1960s Adult Coloring Books: Vessels for Political Satire

Whereas today's adult coloring books are primarily promoted as stress-relievers, those of the 1960s served a far more subversive and satirical role, and were often politically charged. Because early adult coloring books have such a lengthy and interesting history, we've compiled a list that will teach you all about them.

While the 1961 "Executive Coloring Book" appears to be presenting relatively boring, corporate images derived from the life of a business executive, its captions reveal an edgier side satirizing business executives. The caption for an image that depicts the executive with others in an elevator reads, "This is my elevator. It takes me way up high. People who are not executives stand right next to me in my elevator. They are all right, but I would not want my daughter to marry one of them." In another image of the executive holding his suit while getting dressed for work, the caption states: "This is my suit. Color it gray or I will lose my job." Such captions illustrate the culturally subversive and satirical tone used in 1960s adult coloring books.

Adult coloring books that followed included the 1962 "JFK Coloring Book" by Mort Drucker, which for 14 weeks topped the New York Times Non-Fiction Best Sellers list, as well as "New Frontier Coloring Book" by Joe B. Nation, both of which featured satire directed toward President Kennedy. The "JFK Coloring Book" displayed caricatures of members from the Kennedy family on each page, accompanied by tongue-in-cheeck captions narrated from the child's point of view. The page that depicts President Kennedy, for instance, displays the text: "This is my Daddy. He has a good job. He works for the Government. Color him red, white and blue. My daddy is very important. He has a lot of people working for him. They would do anything for my daddy. Color their noses burnt umber."

Because early adult coloring books have such a lengthy and interesting history, we've compiled a list that will teach you all about them.

Also emerging in 1962 were coloring books that focused on the communist scare and conspiracy theorists. "Khrushchev's Top Secret Coloring Book" satirized Soviet communism and its leaders, as can be inferred from the book's title that references the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Fun fact: Khrushchev was the man behind both de-Stalinization and the Soviet space program. While that coloring book satirized communists, others criticized the conspiracy theorists preoccupied with the threat of communism, as was the case with the "John Birch Society Coloring Book," named for the anti-communist John Birch Society. To give you an idea, one page depicts the Liberty Bell in chains, accompanied by the caption, "This is our new national symbol. It is called the security bell." The opposite page depicts a rocking chair with the accompanying caption, "This is the symbol of the New Frontier. It gives a feeling of motion without getting us anywhere."

And then there were coloring books like "The Hipster Coloring Book", also published in 1962, which satirized the 1960s version of the hipster. (That's right, hipsters have in fact been around since the late 1950s.) Here, the captions poked fun at the hipsters' lifestyle and their slang—for example, one caption reads, "This is the Hipster's house. It is called his pad. He spends a lot of time in his pad. Sometimes, in fact, lots of times, he has company at his pad." In this example, the caption mocks the adoption of the term "pad" to describe someone's home. But as you might observe, the captions in these coloring books became less clever in their satire, instead simply imitating and mocking lifestyles and organizations that were broadly believed to be vapid.

Another coloring book titled "The Bureaucrat's Coloring Book" satirized the layers of bureaucracy embedded in the government's processes and regulations, while a 1963 book, "Programmer's Primer and Coloring Book," reads like a comic book filled with nonsensical jokes about programming. A drawing of a stick figure-esque man wearing Mickey Mouse ears is accompanied by the text, "I am an M.L. Coder. I like absolute octal programming. Color me Mickey Mouse." A childish drawing of a bug sits above the caption, "See the program Bug. He is our friend!! Color him swell. He gives us JOB SECURITY," and a simple drawing of dreary landscape features the text, "Here is an Outlook. Color it BLEAK." In contrast to the instructional captions in the preceding 1960s coloring books—which often instructed the colorer to use an actual color, even if the specific color was part of a layered joke—the captions in these slightly later coloring books became increasingly abstract. The joke transformed, becoming more about the fact that coloring something "bleak," for instance, is an entirely subjective instruction, as "bleak" has no objective visual referent.

In 1968, a coloring book actually became involved in a historically significant political and racial conflict. The book, titled "The Black Panther Coloring Book" entered circulation in America in 1968, becoming the center of a political dispute between the Black Panthers and the FBI. Reportedly, COINTELPRO, the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program, created and disseminated the incredibly racist coloring book, which was made to look like Black Panthers propaganda and was purported to be distributed by the Black Panthers. The images contained inside the book were designed to infuriate white people and ultimately discredit the black population's grievances, depicting, for instance, cops as literal pigs. Although it has yet to be proven that the FBI was behind the distribution of the book, there is a general consensus that this is the case.

Where It All Began: A History of Coloring Books

Although the adult coloring book craze seems like a recent artifact of the 21st century, it's not the first time that they have been popular. They were also popular in the 1960s, as you learned above, but coloring books have been around for even longer than that. To understand how and why coloring books came into existence, we're tracing their history all the way back to the 1800s.

The invention of the first coloring book is generally attributed to the McLoughlin Brothers who published "The Little Folks Painting Book" around 1879. The book consisted of short rhymes, stories, and verses each with accompanying outline engravings that illustrated the respective textual component, and that were designed to be colored using watercolor paints. Compared with more modern children's coloring books that feature very simple images, the outlined images depicted in "The Little Folks Painting Book" are significantly more intricate. As you might infer from the book's title, early coloring books were used with paints instead of dry media, prior to crayons becoming a staple in the American family household.

By the late 1880s, coloring books had become conventional parts of childhood—they had entered the mainstream, so to speak. While this can be partially attributed to the McLoughlin Brothers, who, as mentioned, continued to publish and promote coloring books for children, the rise of coloring books is also owed to several other factors, as discussed by Vox in their article about the history of coloring books.

Perhaps the most important factor is a technological one—the proliferation of lithography as a printing process. Lithography came to America in the 1850s after being developed in Europe prior to that. The lithographic printing process involved having the artist draw on a stone or metal plate with either fat, oil, or wax, and then chemically treating the plate with a mixture of gum arabic and acid that would etch only the negative parts of the image (the parts that were not concealed by the grease drawing). This process thus created a plate in which the drawn parts of the image were raised, such that when ink was applied to the plate and the plate then pressed to paper, the image would be reproduced on the page.

At the time, copyright laws were less restrictive than modern copyright laws, and violations were more difficult to track.

Lithography had significant implications for the publishing industry, as it allowed for images to be reproduced quickly, easily, and cost-effectively. This made it more affordable for publishers to produce illustrated books like coloring books, as the production costs were lower and the book could be sold for less money than it otherwise would have been. Similarly, coloring books were also made more affordable because of relaxed copyright laws. At the time, copyright laws were less restrictive than modern copyright laws, and violations were more difficult to track. Publishers were easily able to reproduce images from other previously published books without facing consequences, even further decreasing the production costs associated with publishing a coloring book or any other illustrated book, for that matter.

Both paint and coloring books became even more culturally important as they began to be integrated into an American concept of a democratic art education, which dated back to the 1800s. This discourse in America's history was informed by the ideas espoused by a few important Europeans: Joshua Reynolds, a British artist, and Johann Pestalozzi, a Swiss educator. Their work formed the ideology that backgrounded and inspired to the "democratization of art" process in America. Educators came to believe that an art education would benefit all students, not solely as an aesthetic exercise, but also as a means of both promoting the development of useful skills and catalyzing cognitive learning. It became accepted that teaching art would be useful for all students, universally, rather than just those who aspired to be artists. Through the integration of tangible materials such as clay, blocks, and paint into children's curricula, children would better be able to exercise their innate reasoning and observation abilities.

The prevalence of this new attitude toward art education had commercial effects, as associating art with any given company's products had a positive effect on the company's sales. Several companies began to advertise this association between their product and art, broadly, through promotional materials such as coloring booklets. Printed on cheap paper, coloring books became a marketing strategy. See, for example, this 1880s coloring booklet titled "Easy Drawing for Little Ones" published by Fleischmann Co., as well as this 1900 version, "The Singer Drawing Book for Young Artists" published by Singer Sewing Machine Co. These coloring books served the dual purpose of both teaching children about drawing as well as developing brand loyalty.

The coloring books that were primarily published as advertising materials marked a transition from the high quality paint books that were nicely bound and intended to last, to the much lower quality, cheaply made coloring books that became synonymous with simpler, modern coloring books. In 1922, even newspapers had begun to publish drawn designs intended to be colored in by children. This is when coloring books became disposable books meant to briefly hold children's attention as they were filled with color and eventually thrown away. This era of coloring books also coincided with the rise of Crayola crayons, which had become increasingly popular and whose release of the "64-color pack" was a "watershed" moment, according to David Shayt, the curator of the Smithsonian Museum of American History's Crayola Collection.

Since then, coloring books have had notable applications in educational contexts. Their pictorial nature makes them an ideal tool for teaching for several reasons. Foremost, images and image-based activities more easily hold children's attention for long periods of time than, say, reading, especially when children are just learning to read (consider, for example, the almost-universal prevalence of early children's books that are picture books, rather than simply text). Relatedly, teaching through pictures and coloring also has motivational effects on learning. The pictorial nature of coloring books have also made them an invaluable learning tool because of their non-verbal quality, which again, is useful for children just learning to read, but is also useful for teaching in contexts where students do not speak or understand the language in which instruction is given.

As exemplified by one of our top adult coloring book picks, "The Anatomy Coloring Book," the role of coloring books in education expanded in the 1980s to include their use in graduate-level scientific coursework. In this context, coloring books serve as a learning aid for the memorization of diagrammatic materials, primarily through the technique of color coding. By color coding detailed diagrams, parts of the diagram become more memorable, activating a person's visual memory rather than solely their verbal memory.

Other coloring books have been highly politicized, such as the 2011 coloring book published by Really Big Coloring Books, "We Shall Never Forget: The Kids Book of Freedom." The coloring book portrays and recounts the events that took place when Osama bin Laden was shot and killed in his home by SEAL Team 6 in 2011. The book sparked controversy through its inclusion of images that negatively portrayed Muslims as being universally radical, extremist, and terrorist. It also depicted events that were refuted by the White House, such as in the case of one image displaying Osama bin Laden holding a woman between himself and a gun. This book serves as further evidence that coloring books can serve as vehicles for political ideology—in this case, right-wing propaganda—offering up a form easily appropriable by ideological groups.

Now, even presidential candidates have their own coloring books. Even with their inherent relationship to politics, however, today's "political" coloring books lack the satirical edge touted by those of the 1960s.

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