Cool Tools

Praise for Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities: "There is something magical in the book's juxtaposition of stuff, folklore and product reviews ..." - New York Times "This may well be the greatest catalog of all-time..." - Engadget "The result is something more than just a paper-bound list of awesome objects. It's a tool itself." - Wired "This wonderful book is so much more than hardware and electronics however, this is 472 pages of inspired genius." - Time Out "It's 460+ full-color pages of ear-to-ear grinning, hours of ooh-ing and aah-ing, and years of repetitive page-turning." - GeekDad "It is like sitting with the old Sunday funnies, slowly poring over the colorful illustrations and finding surprises on every page." - The Joiner's Apprentice "A real geek's geek-guide to tools." - American Design and Master-Craft Initiative "Guaranteed you will want 4,000 things from this huge catalogue." - The Coast "What a knockout! Book of the year!" - Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons "When this fabulous, amazing, unputdownable book arrived at my studio I immediately spent two and a half hours in it, and then the next morning passed another three-hour stint of 'Wow - look at this! I could do that!' This book is more exciting - in both what it actually offers and what kind of life it suggests - than anything I've read for a very long time. It's an outstanding achievement in every sense - content, design, and quality. - Brian Eno, musician, artist "Flipping through Cool Tools is a completely different experience from reading the same material online. Long live dead trees!" - David Pescovitz, Boing Boing "If this doesn't solve some large part of your Christmas shopping challenges, you need a different set of people to whom you give Christmas presents. The book itself (a real print 463-page glossy-stock oversizer) is great either for young people starting a home, or geezers who are in touch with their youth who might want to be shocked and reminded why so much of their take-control-of-your-own-life life is the way it is, or somebody who just could use a striking coffee-table conversation-starter/stopper. And then there are the hundreds and hundreds of amazing things - "tools" defined extremely widely and deeply as stuff that really works reviewed by people who've actually used them - to give you more gift ideas." - Joel Garreau, The Washington Post, author of Edge City and Radical Evolution "I don't know an adjective large enough to do it justice." - Michael Litchfield, Fine Homebuilding "I love it. A worthy successor to the Whole Earth Catalog." - Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography "This is a roundup of over 1500 tool reviews with incredibly useful tips and how-tos covering just about everything you can imagine. On one page there will be a recommendation for a great truck (Toyota pickup) on another they'll be tips on learning how to swim properly (it's all about the stroke length). This is, without a doubt, my favorite book to come out in 2013." - Sal Cangeloso, Geek.com "The Cool Tools book was sitting on the counter of the bar when an old boatbuilding friend stopped by and immediately became immersed in it. His exact words: "I GET this! There's no buttons to press!" - George Dyson, author of Turing's Cathedral "Best coffee table books = size of coffee table. Kudos for the beautiful Cool Tools collection." - Scott McCloud, cartoonist "Right now, do not pass Go, do not collect $200 ... just grab a copy of Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. It's 460+ full-color pages of ear-to-ear grinning, hours of ooh-ing and aah-ing, and years of repetitive page-turning. After it arrived at my door, I lost almost two full hours in its pages before re

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 1999. He is editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets half a million unique visitors per month. From 1984--1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. His last book, What Technology Wants (Viking/Penguin October 18, 2010), asserted that technology as a whole is not just a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. He also authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control. Kevin Kelly's website is kk.org.