Already into our first week of December, the holiday month flies by about as fast as the bills spill out of our wallets. But fear not! Wink Books and Wink Fun have some extraordinary gift ideas ($3-$19!) that won’t bust your budget. (For less budget-minded ideas, you can also check out Gareth Branwyn’s 2015 gift list.)
Grids & Guides: A Notebook for Visual Thinkers
(Princeton Architectural Press)
$13
Buy on Amazon • Full review and sample pages
Grids & Guides is an ideas book as suitable for engineers and makers as it is for visual artists and other artsy types. Rather than the usual lined pages, this notebook – or self-described journal – offers eight different repeating patterns, such as a dotted point grid, a triangular isometric grid, and a diamond pattern grid… and works as both a repository for new ideas as well as a springboard that inspires out-of-the-box thinking. It makes a great gift for anybody with a creative thought at their fingertips. – Carla Sinclair
Kendama
Ages 6 and up
$18
Buy on Amazon • Full review and sample pages
I’m back from the 2015 International Toy Fair in New York (my 30th Toy Fair!). Here’s one trend I noticed around the show: kendama. It’s a traditional Japanese folk toy: ken (sword) and tama (ball) both usually made of wood and turned on a lathe…You flip the ball up in the air and try to catch it on the spike. There are lots of other tricks, like catching the ball on the side cups, or using the string to go “around the world” (like a yoyo trick), etc. – Bob Knetzger
Fisheye, Wide Angle and Macro Clip-on iPhone Camera Lenses
$3
Buy on Amazon • Full review and sample pages
I bought this camera lens kit for the heck of it, because it cost only $3.14 including shipping, via Amazon… The macro lens is excellent for getting very close detail shots of small objects. The fish-eye and wide-angle lenses are similar to each other, but the fish-eye gives a more exaggerated bubble view. The kit also comes with lens caps and a little cloth drawstring pouch to keep all the pieces together. – Mark Frauenfelder
A Wrinkle in Time
by Madeleine L’Engle (author) and Hope Larson (illustrator)
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
$14
Buy on Amazon • Full review and sample pages
Hope Larson captures the heart and soul of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time in this graphic novel adaptation…. Meg Murray, her little brother Charles Wallace and their new friend Calvin O’Keefe journey through time and space to rescue Mr. Murray, who has been missing over a year…they tesser from planet to planet and battle the Dark Thing… an excellent introduction of L’Engle’s book to a new generation of readers. – Kay McGriff
Tenzi
Ages 7 and up
$13
Buy on Amazon • Full review and sample pages
There’s no board, no game pieces, no cards – just candy-colored dice. Each player gets 10 dice. Someone yells “Go!” Then everyone keeps rolling, over and over, until someone gets the same number on all 10 dice and shouts, “Tenzi!” When my family first got this game I thought it sounded too simple to be fun, but once we started playing we were all laughing as we frantically and clumsily rolled our handfuls of dice. And to keep the game fresh there are many variations… – Carla Sinclair
Death and the Afterlife
by Clifford A. Pickover (Sterling)
$11
Buy on Amazon • Full review and sample pages
Beautifully hardbound with a whimsical, tactilely pleasing cover that will look great on any shelf, this book is a serious, abridged encyclopedia of the macabre. It’s the full stew simmered down to a tasty reduction, and it gives you an amuse-bouche of fact, philosophy, and art, while acknowledging that there is so much more out there on which to dine. Given the bite-sized morsels, you could take a nip of this book here and there, but more likely you’ll devour it in large chunks… – Aaron Downey
750 Years in Paris
by Vincent Mahé (Nobrow)
$19
Buy on Amazon • Full review and sample pages
750 Years in Paris is a historical graphic novel sans words as well as a stunning coffee table art book. Paris-based artist Vincent Mahé illustrates 60 snapshots of the same building in Paris, spanning from the year 1265 with cows grazing in front of its humbler beginnings to 2015 in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo tragedy. With the smallest of details, Mahé is able to subtly and masterfully inject humor, horror, nostalgia, historical facts and pride into his various images… – Carla Sinclair
Fantastic Cities: A Coloring Book of Amazing Places Real and Imagined
by Steve McDonald (Chronicle Books)
$11
Buy on Amazon • Full review and sample pages
Fantastic Cities is a beautiful book of detailed pen-and-ink drawings of cities from around the world, including London, Paris, Toronto, Tokyo, San Francisco, New York, Istanbul and many others. And including some slivers of real places mixed with imaginative cityscape mandalas. With books like this, coloring is as much fun for adults as it is for kids! – Carla Sinclair
Animals Upon Animals
Ages 4 and up
$19
Buy on Amazon • Full review and sample pages
A dice-rolling and stacking game where you take 7 animals and roll a die that determines how you need to stack those pieces upon the animals that have come before… While it’s marketed as a children’s game, and I’ve played it as such (my 3-year-old daughter destroyed me), I’ve also played it with adults, and it was just as fun…The pieces are of the great quality that you would expect from HABA games but with enough curved edges to make them difficult to stack. – James Orr
Intelligent Sentient?
by Luke Ramsey (Drawn & Quarterly)
$16
Buy on Amazon • Full review and sample pages
I’ve got to tell you, I had a real mind-warping moment with this book. I can’t think of too many (non-chemically-assisted) art immersions that have altered my consciousness more than Intelligent Sentient? In 64 pages, artist and commercial illustrator, Luke Ramsey, and a group of collaborators create a bizarre alternative world that is as alien as it is familiar… When’s the last time your consciousness got altered just by looking at a book? – Gareth Branwyn
