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This Little Piggie Stayed at Home
Download the Idler Price List, listing all the books we sell, plus t-shirts and other stuff.
The new cloth-bound 350 page annual Idler, a collection of radical essays with contributions from Alain De Botton, Penny Rimbaud, John Mitchinson, Jay Griffiths, Paul Kingsnorth, Oliver James. Published 17 June 2009. Pre-order now for £18.99.
We’re thinking of bucking the trend this year and getting luxurious gifts for loved ones. Books and food should never be “economised” on, and it’s better to get small amounts of very good stuff than large amounts of rubbish. Feed the body and mind with quality ingredients. My friend Alan is selling the most fantastic [...]
The writer, critic and founder of Hermenaut magazine, Joshua Glenn, has just published an important piece of work called The Idler’s Glossary with Biblioasis in Canada. It’s a very nicely produced and illustrated pocket-sized guide to around 400 idling related terms, from Absent-minded to Working-Class Hero. A shorter version appeared in the Idler magazine nearly [...]
This a diary like no other. With appointment pages interspersed with things to do, recipes, drawings, arcana, poems and other pearls of wisdom – the “Idler Diary” will help you gently float down river in 2009. Illustrated in glorious technicolour by the Idler’s crack team of artists and cartoonists and with contributions for a nationwide [...]
We are born free but are everywhere in chains.
Our culture needs some fresh air. We are boring ourselves to death by re-packaging the same flavourless pap based on a patronizing and second-hand version of what we think other people want. Meanwhile, out there, the world is as complex, beautiful, and mysterious as ever.
Which is why [...]
“The Book of Idle Pleasures” is a restorative gift book for the stressed out, tired and hassled. An antidote to our non-stop culture, it is a welcome compedium of timeless delights. The book lists and reflects on 100 simple pastimes and proves that the best things in life really are free: lighting fires, skimming stones, [...]
The author of How to Be Idle, Tom Hodgkinson, now shares his delightfully irreverent musings on what true independence means and what it takes to be free. The Freedom Manifesto draws on French existentialists, British punks, beat poets, hippies and yippies, medieval thinkers, and anarchists to provide a new, simple, joyful blueprint for modern [...]
From Tom Hodgkinson, editor of the Idler, comes How To Be Idle, an antidote to the work-obsessed culture which puts so many obstacles between ourselves and our dreams. Hodgkinson presents us with a laid-back argument for a new contract between routine and chaos, an argument for experiencing life to the full and living in the [...]
50 Tales of hell on earth. Crap Holidays brings together 50 cringe-making tales of what happens when the dream holiday turns intoa nightmare – painfully funny stories of family dysfunction and fall out, inedible food and exotic illnesses, gruesome injuries and ferocious arguments, etc.
The new Idler is available now. The design has been overhauled by typesetter Christian Brett of Bracketpress and the cover is by Damien Hirst. The theme is sex. Inside there are interviews with Kevin Godley of 10cc fame, and Esther Perel, author of the best-selling Mating in Captivity. Other contributors include Neil Boorman, Michael Bywater, [...]
THE CLOUDSPOTTER’S GUIDE by GAVIN PRETOR-PINNEY
Gavin has been the creative director of the Idler for thirteen years, and his first book needs no introduction. Where Chris Yates loves to look down at the watery depths, Gavin likes to look up to the watery heights where the clouds play. His lovely fluffy book is a treat [...]
THE MYWAY CODE by DAN KIERAN AND IAN VINCE
Dan is the Idler’s deputy editor and Ian is well known to our readers for his Social Scrutiny forms. Their new book is a hilarious satire on our national obsession with signs and lines and rules and chevrons — all the absurd attempts to control road users [...]
How Very Interesting: Peter Cook’s Universe And All That Surrounds It, by Paul Hamilton, Peter Gordon and Dan Kieran.
Compiled by Idler film editor Paul Hamilton and dep ed Dan, this is a wonderful collection of interviews with friends and collegaues of Peter Cook. How Very Interesting features anecdote and reminiscence from John Cooper Clarke, Will [...]
World’s Worst Jokes by Tony Husband
Buy Now From Amazon.co.uk
Tony Husband is well known to Idler readers as the creator of the Neville cartoon and compiler of the celebrity jokes page. Tony also contributes to Private Eye where he does the Yobs strip. Now he has collected together all the worst jokes he could find. And [...]
Chris Yates is known in the angling world as a legendary carp fisherman. He is also the Idler’s tea correspondent. We recommend his beautiful book to anyone interested in either angling or doing nothing, or indeed both, since it is Chris’s belief that fishing is a really about doing nothing except for being with nature.
Buy [...]
Idler 38: The Green Man, or How To Save The World Without Really Trying
The latest issue of the Idler is our best ever. Arguing that the most effective solution for combating climate change is simply to do nothing, since it is man’s interference that has caused the problems in the first place, we once again [...]
HOW TO BE FREE by TOM HODGKINSON
Here are some quotes from the reviews so far:
“One of the most provocatively entertaining, creatively subversive and, frankly, essential manifestoes of this or any moment,” Time Out
“An inspiring collection of historical references and intriguing socio-cultural comment for those of us who yearn to cast off our corporate and consumer [...]
BACK IN 1983, in an inter view with broadcaster Brian Walden, Mrs Thatcher caught the public imagination with her promotion of “Victorian values”:
Walden: You’ve really outlined an approval of what I would call Victorian values. The sort of values, if you like, that helped to build the country throughout the 19th century. Now is that [...]
The new 350 page Idler, a collection of radical essays by Alain De Botton, Penny Rimbaud, John Mitchinson, Jay Griffiths, Paul Kingsnorth, Oliver James. Published 17 June 2009. In Stock. Order now.
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Order Now. Published 5th March. "Wise, funny, practical and personal, The Idle Parent puts the fun back into parenting." Oliver James
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A sumptuous compendium of one hundred pleasures, each lovingly described and illustrated.
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"Packed with wit, anecdotes and ideas ..." Word Magazine
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Take control of your life and reclaim your right to be idle.
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"Very funny...should be at the top of Tony Blair's reading
list." The Times
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Recommended to anyone interested in either angling or doing nothing.
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"Read this eye-opening and amusingly written book" Daily Mail
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The Idler is a bi-annual, book-shaped magazine that campaigns against the work ethic. It was founded in 1993 by Tom Hodgkinson and his friend Gavin Pretor-Pinney. The intention of the magazine is to return dignity to the art of loafing, to make idling into something to aspire towards rather than reject. As well as providing a radical and thought-provoking read, the Idler is also very funny. MORE …
"I do nothing and then I do something. But it's taken years of investigating idleness in all its forms to be able to achieve this. My discipline is borne out of concerted study of idleness." Will Self: Idler 2
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