Six great books for hobbyists and self-improvers

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Each season brings a burst of titles taking readers through different pursuits, from natural dyes to drawing and carpentry. The best don’t just teach, they inspire. In The Artist’s Sketchbook, senior curator at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum Jenny Gaschke draws on her expertise to compile a guide to artists’ sketchbooks, from Leonardo da Vinci to the present day. In Winnie-the-Pooh illustrator EH Shepard’s sketches, she highlights how preliminary tracings help to perfect the final work, while collages by the fashion artist Julie Verhoeven illustrate how sketchbooks can become invaluable repositories for scraps of inspiration. One of Gaschke’s desires in writing the book was, she says, to “encourage everyone to use a sketchbook”.

A new edition of Ursula K Le Guin’s “handbook for storytellers”, originally published by the late science-fiction writer in 1998 and now available in the UK for the first time, offers a practical guide for those more interested in the craft of words. Tasks include writing a paragraph without any punctuation in order to understand its “beautiful, elegant” importance, or repeating the same phrase multiple times in a paragraph to practise “rhythm”. As Le Guin notes, “craft enables art”, and every writer “learned it by doing it”.

Donald Judd began making his own furniture in the spirit of an enthusiast. Dissatisfied with the furniture he found in Marfa’s Texan wilds after he moved from New York in the 1970s, the artist decided to make his own, building chairs, tables and beds out of straight lengths of timber. Donald Judd Furniture, a magenta book celebrating his minimalist, functional forms, is a brilliant introduction to his philosophy of carpentry. More than 100 designs are explored through Judd’s original sketches, blueprints, photographs and specifications, while his essays and interviews contain aphorisms for the budding carpenter: “If a chair or a building is not functional […] it is ridiculous.”

Mushrooms are soaked to produce colours from deep red to sky blue

Alice Hoyle learned to knit as a child before taking a course in knitwear design, working at Wool and the Gang, and finally starting her own knitwear platform, Rows (which now has a cult following on Instagram). In Knit, Hoyle shows readers how to make her bestselling styles, from sweater vests to cushions. Her colourful, geometric designs use interesting stitches picked up from her grandmother’s stash of magazine cuttings, and draw on the “patterns and colours in everyday life”, be it pavement slabs or woven fabrics. The book is primarily aimed at intermediate knitters, but Hoyle’s detailed advice makes it accessible to all (though it’s advisable to begin in the company of someone more experienced).

Hobbies don’t have to be solitary pursuits, though. In Book of Games, the German artist Carsten Höller sets out his tongue-in-cheek diversions for single players or groups, with illustrations by Höller and artwork by names such as Inez & Vinoodh and Nan Goldin. Highlights include “making friends with a fly” (choose a nearby insect and “communicate using your mental powers”), and imitating contortionist poses from 19th-century Swedish photographer Carl Jacob Malmberg’s Gymnastics series. 

The more idiosyncratic might find a new interest in The Mushroom Color Atlas, a guide to “coaxing out” fungi’s rainbow hues and turning them into dyes and inks. Artist, educator and “mycophile” Julie Beeler began experimenting with mushrooms in her work more than a decade ago when she was seeking an alternative to the “flat harshness” of synthetic colours. She takes readers through the process of soaking them like tea leaves and combining the result with mordants, precipitants and binders to produce colours from deep red through sky blue to a rich, “heart-melting” orange.